ORICL Panel: Robertsville and Scarboro Communities, Part 1

ORICL Panel, Part 3: Robertsville and Scarboro Communities
“The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and Early Oak Ridge”
Interviewed by Joan-Ellen Zucker
July 17, 2000
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. KOLB: Thank you Pat. I’m Jim Kolb, and I’m an officer in the newly formed Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association (ORHPA), and you all are a perfect host. As you have probably seen in the newspaper, our one main project, our first main project is the preservation of the old Senior Center or Wildcat Den. I would like to just briefly catch you up to date on why our organization was founded and where we are going. About a year ago or two, Cheyenne Hall fell down by the hospital on the (Oak Ridge) Turnpike. That galvanized a huge number of people in Oak Ridge to say, “What’s going to be left when we start knocking down all our original buildings?”
So, one of our main projects of our new association is to preserve the World War II heritage of our buildings. There are only five as of now, only five public buildings left in Oak Ridge. The Wildcat Den, Senior Citizen Center, the Alexander Hotel, the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) research building on Illinois Avenue, the original Energy Museum on Jefferson Avenue, and the American Red Cross building which was the original housing office. Those five are the only ones left. And they could all be gone in a matter of years. So that’s one of our main projects.
The second one is we have started an oral history project. What’s an oral history project? This means we want to document. We have started it. It’s happening, to document the history of Oak Ridgers, also pre-Oak Ridgers, by the way, not just Oak Ridge, but the pre-Oak Ridge communities are included. Wheat and Anderson County, etc. We want the people that were here, the people that came here, the children that were raised here of which many are in the audience. We want your reflections on your life in Oak Ridge and these will all be preserved in a formal way. We have made arrangements with the Center for Research on War and History, I believe it is, over at UT (University of Tennessee), which is a national center to use their facilities and any regards to. The easy part is getting the oral history on tape. This just lets people talk and we have a very well organized interview form for doing that, but the hard part, the costly part is to transcribe that into a written document. That is really what is important so that historians can actually look at the written word of these people and use these histories.
And that comes to a third part. That is to gather mementos and artifacts of Oak Ridge, early Oak Ridge, pre-Oak Ridge into another museum facility here in Oak Ridge. I’ll close with the statement that we have several forms and I will be back at the back when you close which I will be glad to hand you, but going back to the oral history, the main reason for fundraising, asking for your membership is that there will be a cost involved with doing these transcriptions. This is going to be hours, hundreds of hours of transcribing time over years. Thousands of hours I should say, and this may require a paid transcriber who does this professionally. So we have membership forms in the back. Membership starts at $20 per family. I will be back in the back and I will enlist your all’s support. Thank you.
MS. CLARK: I wanted to tell you a little bit about, well first of all, the handout you have is the first two pages of a Declaration of Taking. This came from Reba Holmberg. And that gives you an idea of some of the paper work involved. She also had brought in a Xerox of a permission, this is in March of ’43 for a J.A. Freels to come back and remove some of his property that he had left, apparently, when he moved and there is a sample of that in the back. I have samples of maps up there and I’m going to hold a couple down here so that everybody doesn’t have to rush up there to see it, but this is a map of the Robertsville area again. Reba brought this to me, identifying places and on the map in back, I have circled in red the places that the homesteads site which is now, for example, where the Civic Center is, or where the high school is. Because this is something that I have tried to visualize what was here before and I think this helps a lot and there is a map, this map back there. I also have and I had this last week.
The Kingston Demolition Range map that was done by TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) on instructions from the Army when they came and they told TVA that they wanted this segment, this segment, and this segment put together in one map and TVA then said, “Call the Army”. And they said, “We like to name our maps. What should we call our map?” They said, “The Kingston Demolition Range”. So, that was the first name of Oak Ridge before Clinton Engineer Works.
Our panel today is from Anderson County area of pre-Oak Ridge and Joan-Ellen Zucker, whom I had introduced earlier with John Rice Irwin. Joan-Ellen is going to be moderating this panel.
MRS. ZUCKER: Am I on? I have one question, should people move these microphones towards them, Pat. I wasn’t here before.
MS. CLARK: [answer off camera]
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I guess we will scoot them around and if some of you can’t hear, please don’t hesitate to announce that fact because I want you to be able to hear it all. I am so happy to be here with this wonderful looking group of people. And I would like to ask the, each person to introduce themselves. And we will start with Mr. Tunnell at the corner. Just tell us who you are, and a little bit about yourself, and go around the table and we will see where we get. Can’t have the whole hour, everybody, ok, just for introductions. Yes, sir.
MR. TUNNELL : I didn’t realize that any particular subject you asked us to speak on. I just know I was here when the war was declared. I was going to Robertsville High School and I do know that after I graduated there, they tore a part of the building down. Every school that I ever attended they’ve torn the building down. Marlow School, University of Tennessee Law School. So that tells you something about my character.
This gentleman just spoke here a minute ago, apparently there are some things about Oak Ridge that he doesn’t know that a lot of us do know. I am in one of the buildings here that he didn’t mention. We call it the Tunnell Building, prior to my going to law school, they called it Tunnel, but they added the Tunnell on after I graduated from law school, especially when I went to Harvard a while. (Laughter) But the Tunnell Building was the old Eastman Building, and I appreciate the fact that I have fixed it up so nice that they think that it is a modern, new building. People do come in and make that comment.
I graduated along with Naomi in 1942 with the last group to graduate from Robertsville High School. My parents owned a farm over in the Marlow Community. We have been there, we at one time had 1000 acres of land from 61, where 61 (inaudible) merges, and then went on up in the Dossett Community. We owned up to the top of the ridge on West Outer.
MRS. ZUCKER: Can we come back to that and go around the table and find out where everybody is from? Let’s go one by one and find out what your brief history is in the region and where your original property was, where you originally lived. I think that would be interesting to everybody.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Thank you very much. I am Naomi Magill Brummitt. I was born in Roane County, Bear Creek Valley, which is below Y-12, in a log cabin. I am the seventh child of Frank Magill and Addie Reed Magill. I don’t know what my claim to fame is except I was the seventh child, the runt of the family.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, that’s pretty good. That’s good enough for me. Thank you.
MR. WRIGHT: I am Raoul Wright. And I am the descendent of David and Mary Jane Loveday. The farm is over behind X-10. It was a 960 acre farm, big farm. My mother taught school at Wheat. And I have been living in Oak Ridge all my life.
MRS. ZUCKER: I’m glad. And how about you, Mrs. Wintenberg?
MRS. WINTENBERG: My name is Henrietta Peck Wintenberg and I grew up in Robertsville. One of seven children. My relatives gave Robertsville its name. Collins Roberts was my mother’s great-great-grandfather. And Olivers, Olivers Springs was named for the Olivers on the Peck side. The first postmaster at Clinton, which was Burville in those days, was Arthur Crozier. My mother married a Crozier. I attended Robertsville High School, UT, LMU some, and I have a master’s from Peabody, which is now Vanderbilt University. I live right here in Oak Ridge. We built a home in Clinton and then we built a home in Emory Valley on Carnegie Drive. We have, I am the mother of two children. Our son, Dr. Alan Wintenberg works at ORNL, our daughter lives in Syracuse, New York. I taught in the Oak Ridge, six different elementary schools in Oak Ridge for thirty years and our old home place and farm was where, beginning on Vermont Avenue down by the Catholic School and Church, on down through the Lutheran Church, the Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and up by the Episcopal Church is the old Peck home place cemetery, and that is where my father is buried. Our farm also encompassed part of the mall. So it is very easy to find our home, our old farm. People tell me, “I can’t find your farm”. And I said, “Well, maybe it’s just covered up”.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I’m glad that we didn’t completely run you off when we bought out your farm. That’s good. A lot of people actually have stayed, I think. And Reba, tell me about your background.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I’m a fifth generation member of the Jet Lockett family who lived in the area. I graduated from Robertsville High School and the University of Tennessee with a BS degree in science. I came here to work for and as a junior chemist in the labs for Tennessee Eastman and the analytical labs at Y-12. I met Bob Holmberg, who was sent here in the SED as a scientist. We have lived in this, in Oak Ridge for fifty years. We have four children. Nancy Harrison, who you may know, she works in Oak Ridge still. Doug, who is in Kentucky, Connie, who lives in LA, and Eric, who lives in Lamoure, California.
MRS. ZUCKER: And Daws Bridges. Daws is my friend. He and I have actually done a videotaped life history of his. It’s very interesting, and I love to lend it.
MR. BRIDGES: She done told my name, Daws Bridges. I guess a lot of people even here that knows that I had a nursery up here at Elza Gate for about fifteen years seems like I worked for everybody and took down trees and this and that. But I lived here, walking distance of Robertsville and I graduated from a corn field. I didn’t graduate from no high school or anything like that. But there were 11 of us children and I mean we worked, and I still work, but works good for you. Keeps you healthy and everything. I even worked for this woman over here.
MRS. ZUCKER: He took down a tree in my yard last week. He still does it. (Laughter)
MR. BRIDGES: I’ve had a good life. I’ve enjoyed life and I am a Christian and I believe in God and I believe in the eternal everything about God and I am glad that I am here today. The first time I ever got to come out here, but it sounds like I might try to come out sometime. I remember the lawyer over there his building, I went in there and took finger prints. They finger printed me in there when I worked for Stone-Webster in 1942. I worked for them in the fall. I had a low badge number, about 156 and I still got it and got my picture on there. That was the place where they hired all their labor and everything in the building that he’s in there. I appreciate that he’s got it fixed up so pretty and everything around there, and I’ve been in it.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, tell me before we go on to Mr. Wright, Reverend Wright. Where was your home place here in Oak Ridge? I know you came through what I call the migration from TVA to Oak Ridge, but where is the place your farm was located?
MR. BRIDGES: My daddy he was a share cropper. So we moved from Lafollette up there, about ten miles out of Lafollette and we moved to Hilltop. That’s up where they call it Hilltop now, but they didn’t call it Hilltop then, they called it Black Top of Black Oak Ridge. Of course, that’s 61. And we lived there about four years and then we moved to a little below Key Springs. Most people know Key Springs, we lived down there. My daddy bought a little place down there. So we lived down there two years, or three, until they moved us out in ’42.
MRS. ZUCKER: And Mr. Reverend Wright, did you have that same kind of history? You came into this area? I’m talking to Mr. Wright now, Reverend Wright. You migrated too didn’t you?
REV. WRIGHT: I came from Norris Dam area.
MRS. ZUCKER: And tell us a little bit about yourself.
REV. WRIGHT: I’m Reverend Ernest Wright. I came to Anderson County as I said from the Norris dam area a little community by the name of Oakdale. A one room school for eight grades. We moved to Bethel Valley back in ’34, about two miles below Scarboro. And I lived in to Oak Ridge until ’42 and went into the Armed Services. Went to France and fought through France, Holland, and Belgium and back into Germany. That’s the story of my life. I’ve been a minister for 43 years, pastoring two different churches for 35 years, approximately. So, I too, have had a great life. I’ve enjoyed my life.
MRS. ZUCKER: Anybody here not have a great life? We should hear about it now. (Laughter) I’ve had a great life. I’m glad to be in good company. If I had come to this area in say 1920, what would be the most prominent names that come to mind. Who were the people that were, the names that I would know. Your family?
MR. TUNNELL: Definitely so. According to Katherine Hoskins, who wrote the history of Anderson County. My family was the first family in Anderson County.
MRS. ZUCKER: Pull the microphone over. Thank you.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I challenge that. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: Well good. Good thing we have them at separate tables. (Laughter)
MR. TUNNELL: Of course since she was born before 1920, she would probably know about that. (Laughter) But according to my people, the farm that we are on now, the farm that I own that is over in the Marlow Community that was actually a part of Oak Ridge, that was given or some kind of grant from the state of Virginia, or North Carolina, many, many years ago. That farm was there before Tennessee was even a state. So it’s been there a long time.
MRS. ZUCKER: So you are talking about what date?
MR. TUNNELL: I’m not sure what the date was.
MRS. ZUCKER: And the name would have been Tunnell?
MR. TUNNELL: Yes. At that time they pronounced it “tunnel”, everyone called it “tunnel”. But after I got a law degree and went to Harvard for a little while, they changed it to “Tunnell”.
MRS. ZUCKER: Good idea.
MR. TUNNELL: And that is what I have known up here in Oak Ridge. I’ll answer either one when anyone calls, especially if they got a good criminal case.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, you dispute what he has to say?
MRS. HOLMBERG: I don’t know dates either.
MRS. ZUCKER: Pull the microphone over would you. I’m louder than anybody else.
MRS. HOLMBERG: Our grandson, Andrew, who is a rising senior at the high school, is a seventh generation of the Jet Lockett family that were born in this area.
MRS. ZUCKER: So we have Tunnell, Jet Lockett. What are some of the other names?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Melton, my grandparents, Melton Hill Dam. I don’t know the dates.
MRS. ZUCKER: Do any of you know where your families immigrated from originally?
MRS. HOLMBERG: My family came from Covington, England. They settled in a busy port in Virginia and eventually drifted down to a spot on Poplar Creek, down near Dyllis, and then moved into this area.
MRS. ZUCKER: Mr. Bridges did you tell me that you knew that your family originally came from English stock?
MR. BRIDGES: England and Scot, yeah. I was thinking about the man talking about the old buildings here. I think I know another old building out here at Grove Center. It use to be Lockett’s Store. I think part of it is still there. They have fixed it up a lot there. Then the little Red Cross building, he named it, I know a boy we use to stop there and pick up. His name was Raines and that little house belong to the Raines up there on up the road if I’m not mistaken. Of course that little Red Cross building is still up there and I think if we got any of these old buildings I think they ought to be fixed up instead of tearing them down. I don’t live in Oak Ridge. I live in Roane County. But I’m for it 100 percent to keep these buildings.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, you’ve got some pretty good company.
MR. BRIDGES: We should have a lot more than what we got.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I would like to add one building that is standing and that is the auditorium at the Robertsville high school. Just before Oak Ridge was taken over, we got our first indoor toilets in the new gym at that location and when they took down the school at Robertsville Middle School, they left the old, new gym, the old place now, and it is now the auditorium at Robertsville Middle School.
MRS. ZUCKER: I went to school at what was then Jefferson Junior High School and remember that auditorium well.
MR. TUNNELL: That’s when Naomi and I graduated from high school, there in that gym. Another building Mr. Bridges failed to mention would be (inaudible) is that stone building out at the Elza Gate. That is a wonderful house out there.
MRS. ZUCKER: Does anybody know when, do you know the building we are talking about, just as you leave Oak Ridge and going east. There is a small stone house and I wonder if, if any one knows who built that? Yes, Pat.
MRS. CLARK: 1942, and the first family was the Owens family, I believe.
MRS. ZUCKER: When I was growing up, it was the Brennens who lived there and it was the only real house.
MR. TUNNELL: It was Oran Hackworth’s house.
MRS. BRUMMITT: It was Oran, O-R-A-N, and Olivia.
MR. TUNNELL: Hackworth.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Kidwell Hackworth.
MR. BRIDGES: I remember that house was there, too. It’s still there?
MRS. ZUCKER: It’s still there. I think so.
MR. BRIDGES: It’s still there, good.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, so those are the names of some of the families we would find here in the 1920’s and most of you have talked about where your families came from before then, but two of you didn’t come from this region over a multi-generational period. Reverend Wright, you can through the migration, you lived, you were dispossessed by TVA. Is that correct?
REV. WRIGHT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Tell us about that. Let’s go back to TVA and what happened.
REV. WRIGHT: My folks came originally from Cedar Creek, above Lafollette. That’s where my father was raised until, of course, about ’34 when Norris Dam was well under way while they ran everybody out. We came to Anderson County, like I said, two miles below Scarboro. You want me to talk about the bus, the transportation?
MRS. ZUCKER: Let’s get some transportation after a little bit. What I like to do is kind of lay out a historical pattern here. So you got notice to move from TVA land and then you moved to Oak Ridge. So, you went through a double dispossession.
REV. WRIGHT: I moved from Oakdale, a little Oakdale community about two miles below Loyston in Union County and moved to Anderson County and located in Bethel Valley. We owned the cross roads there where the big rock crusher went in. That was on our property. My father owned it. He worked with them, he stayed on. I get to the end of that moving from Oak Ridge. I went into the service in ’42, and missed all that. My mother and father moved and I didn’t know where my home was for, I guess, a year and a half until I was discharged out of the service. I will never forget walking, back then they about walked everywhere you went.
I got off the bus in a little city of Clinton and walked. I knew approximately where it was. I remember I got pretty anxious going up the hill there and came over the tip of the last hill and I could view the old home place below. A barn, an old house, a T-shape, two big rooms, a dining room and kitchen attached to it. Which when I came out of the service we, I cut lumber off of our property there and built a house. My father and I and one of my brothers remodeled his house. Took it all off but the two big rooms and did away with the kitchen and dining room and built him another bedroom and kitchen and a bathroom.
We didn’t have electricity at that time until we milked cows. So there would be milk and after I came out of the service we built an eight stall milk barn and they let us sell Grade-A milk to Norris Creamery. So I worked at that for 14 years. So I decided there was a better way to make a living and then I went to Clinton Courier News and worked for Mr. Wells for three and a half years, moved from there over to Knoxville. Brother Hubert Hodge worked for him, I guess, nine months and then moved up to Greenway there and Beverly Road and worked for Southern (inaudible) Forms until they sold out to (inaudible) Incorporated in Chicago, Illinois, and I didn’t realize at that time that they were a part of Bell and Howell. It wasn’t long until the big company, Bell and Howell, took us over. They kept us until the group wanted the union. Bell and Howell didn’t go for union. They voted the union in and Bill and Howe sold us to (inaudible) printing company, (inaudible), Texas. I worked for them the remainder of 27 years, about 15 years retired. All the time, I pastored these churches. I pastored Heinz Creek Baptist Church for ten and a half years, a little over. Then I was called to Bishopville there in Heiskell Station. Pastored their church 16 and a half a year. I was there without a church for five weeks, and they called me back the second time to Heinz Creek. I went back and pastored there for another nine years.
MRS. ZUCKER: You have had a really busy and productive life, haven’t you? Really good. I would like to find out if any of you remember the effect of the coming of electricity. Do you remember the lights went on in Anderson County? How about you?
MR. WRIGHT: There in Bethel Valley there was no electricity.
MRS. ZUCKER: There was no electricity after TVA?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Before.
MRS. ZUCKER: Before, ok.
MR. WRIGHT: All along through there they hadn’t brought any electrical power in.
MRS. ZUCKER: But after TVA, the lights must have gone on?
MR. WRIGHT: Not where we were at.
MRS. ZUCKER: Not where you were?
MRS. WINTENBERG: From Clinton, they came down through Robertsville with power poles.
MR. WRIGHT: But not Bethel Valley.
MRS. WINTENBERG: And then, I guess, that was the first ones who got the electricity.
MRS. ZUCKER: Did it make a big change in the area?
MRS. HOLMBERG: I suppose I was the only person when TVA had come that had an adverse effect on our lives, because my father had a business selling coal and ice before electricity and so eventually no one needed to have refrigerators. So his business started going down the tubes at that time.
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, that’s too bad. Well, I know he drove a school bus. Everybody here has mentioned your father as a school bus driver. I want to get to that. He was famous.
MRS. HOLMBERG: As business disappeared, he did before he came to work for Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: What were some of the occupations? Was this, would you describe this region as primarily a farming area?
MRS. HOLMBERG: My next-door neighbors who were my cousins. Frank Hightower had an interesting way of getting to work. He laid track and repaired track for the L&N Railroad. He would drive to Elza Gate and believe it or not the train would pick him up and take him to his area of work. In the summer time, or anytime the work site was so far away he lived on the cars, they called it, on a side track that was furnished for housekeeping. So that was fun riding the train every day to work in a rural community. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: That’s really wonderful. There were lots of transportation problems, I can imagine, in a rural district like this. What do you remember about the difficulty with farming in your own backgrounds as farmers? Yeah, talk about all that.
MRS. WINTENBERG: My parents were Irish, English, and French, and they came early. In Anderson County, the first listed was 1650. I don’t want to start a war. (Laughter) But anyhow the community was mostly farmers. People did drive to mills in Clinton by the time I had grown some. Mostly people lived on farms. Of course there was a little mail carrier who had a job, but the work was the key to the community. Everybody worked and you were taught that work was honorable, and that it was something that all of us must do. So, you learn to work. The people who had come down through my ancestors came first to Connecticut and Virginia, and from those two states migrated on to Anderson County. Some of them had as you say land grants, some of them just came, but they were all self-sufficient people. People were courageous, had to be to come into a wilderness. They were very wise. They believed in sharing, not only with their family. They wanted to make a better life for their families, but with the community.
MRS. ZUCKER: So there was a regional community that was strong?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: And it was centered on what? On Robertsville, what was the center, the focus of the community?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Well, it has been mentioned in the past it was probably family. I had two sets of great-grandparents and two sets of grandparents, who lived in the area and they had beauques of cousins and brothers and all in the vicinity of about five miles of each other. Is that what you’re after?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah, but I was just wondering what was the focal point was. Was it Clinton as the county seat? What was the center of commerce?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Robertsville was a community in itself. I think the churches, there were several churches there. In the ‘20s, there was probably a Methodist and Presbyterian church, but by the time we were growing up there was until the people from Norris, they came down to Robertsville and bought farms because there were a lot. Late in ’28, ‘30, along there, there was a Depression in the area, so there were a lot of farms for sale and lots of people like John Rice Irwin’s grandparents came and his own uncle and his own parents, and there were lots of people who moved into Oak Ridge from that, but before that, there were a lot of farm families in the churches and schools, that were the center. There were a lot of people who attended everything at the schools. They were all school minded. My parents said, “Go to school, make good grades, go to school”. My dad always said there is not going to be enough land for all seven of you to have a plot of land. So, choose some vocation, go to college, and choose something that you want to do that you can do and that you want to do.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, did he say that to girls as well as the boys?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Right, of course. Sitting around the dining room table, yes, I heard all the lectures to age one to at least 16 or 17. Behave yourself. Go to school.
MRS. ZUCKER: I want to hear a little more about farm life because it was a farming community.
MR. BRIDGES: We raised cane when we lived up there. There was a fellow named John Pyatt and he had a cane mill over there and we would take our mules, hook it to a wagon, and we would go over there and stay all day, and make molasses over there. A lot of people raised that cane, and then we would bring it back and put it in big cans, lard cans or something like that. When you didn’t have money or something to buy sugar, we would just sweeten it with molasses. There were a lot of things we done like that. We made our own soap. I remember my mother making soap and stuff out of the hogs, when you killed the hogs. You made soap and things with them. I didn’t know Ernest here. That’s where I was born, up there at Cedar Creek, around where his people were at. I didn’t know him up there. When he named Cedar Creek, that’s when I was at Cider Mill. Anyway, seemed like the happiest time of my life was when I went to that CCC camp up at Norris.
MRS. ZUCKER: Can you explain to the audience, I think most people here will know what the CCC was, but if you would explain it.
MR. BRIDGES: It’s a big Conservation Corp. And like poor families and we were counted as a poor family because there was big family of us. So I had an older brother and he went in and then I went in. All you had to say back then, you had to tell a little bitty white lie, if they are a white lie. (Laughter) You walked in and you say, they say, “How old are you?” “Eighteen”. You done been put up to other boys before that. So I was 16 when I went in there. I went to Norris SP-9-44-93 up here at Norris and I stayed up there two months.
All at once I found out that they were shipping a bunch of boys out and we could volunteer and go, or not go. We was going to get to go to the West Coast, to (inaudible). I was really glad to go. My brother, he come up there and he was only 14 years old. He told them he was 18, and he told them he was my twin brother and he was much smaller than I was. (Laughter) They know better, but still they were needing men, I reckon, and they just took him in too. So we went to (inaudible) 14. So we stayed out there about six months. We saw some of the country. We didn’t have a TV to see all these and didn’t know they existed really. We saw some of the prettiest country to go on out to the West Coast and riding that troop train. We ate on it, slept on it, everything. We had just a big time out there in that CCC camp. It was what the CC done.
They done all kinds of tree work, planted trees, and filled up gullies and built roads, and work in a rock quarry. I remember working in a rock quarry. We didn’t have nothing but a wheelbarrow (inaudible) and we would put off little shots and we would take the wheelbarrow and take a big sledge hammer and bust those rocks and take them down there and dump them in the crusher and then they would go in a little dump truck and they would take them out where they needed them and different places like that. Even the government had a poor way of doing it. I remember a dollar a day was all we could make, that was all my daddy could make back in the ‘30’s. When we moved here in ’34, he would try to get a little more work for someone else. I remember when I got to work for Stone-Webster; we made 51 cents an hour. Boy that was flying high! I had money to just do about anything with, more than that now. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: I think I’m cheating because I’m always very entertained by Mr. Bridges stories. I do know, and I believe I am right, that you sent eight dollars of what you made back home.
MR. BRIDGES: We made 30 dollars a month in the camp and they gave us eight. So we had plenty money in the CC camp. Because you see they laundered our clothes and gave us food to eat. We didn’t smoke. I never have smoked, never did drink. So, we didn’t have much to spend our money on.
MRS. ZUCKER: You sent a lot of it home.
MR. BRIDGES: When I came back out of the CC camp we had those silver dollars, I don’t know how many I had in a big locker. We just had a good time. That cc started me out, made me happier than everything at CCC camp.
MRS. ZUCKER: Were any of you in World War II? I know that Reverend Wright was. Was anyone else? Mr. Tunnell?
MR. TUNNELL: I was drafted out of high school. In April, I was drafted out of high school, Robertsville High School. I had been sick and had missed some work in high school and then I went back and I was drafted in April and I took the final examination down at the Fort Oglethorpe. When I had passed through the general headquarters, after taking the IQ test, and for some reason they accepted me, pulled me up into the general headquarters to work. I came back. After they found out down there that I hadn’t graduated from high school, I was scheduled to graduate in May here. Naomi has a copy of the picture there of me in a uniform that I came back and graduated from high school, while I was a private in the Army and I was taking some, then I started college and they moved me down there. I became a good secretary and they sent me to Iran and Iraq. I spent three years over there during World War II.
MRS. ZUCKER: Was that a pivotal experience in your life? Did it change your view of your future to be in service?
MR. TUNNELL: All my life I knew I was going to be a lawyer because I remember Cordel Hull, who had floated down the Tennessee River on a bunch of logs, down to Lebanon and I was going to go to law school down there. On the GI Bill, I didn’t go to law school there. At the University of Tennessee, fortunate enough I got an undergraduate degree, and then graduated from law school, got two degrees over there and then for a short time went to Harvard Law School.
Some of the transportation that he was talking about don’t think he mentioned it. Mr. Bridges, you don’t know this that mules were used to traveled all the time. We would come over to Nash Copeland’s Store from the Marlow Community across our land on what is Key Springs Road now and come over to down where Underwood Road is, just right below where I live. It was Hendricks Hollow then. It had a road there and we would drive a team of mules and come over. It was a wonderful experience to come over there because I got to see Naomi at Nash Copeland’s Store. (Laughter)
MRS. BRUMMITT: My turn.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it’s your turn.
MR. BRIDGES: Now, talking about mules…
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, what a minute. It’s her turn now. She’s had her hand up over there.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Now, I’ve got a sad story. Ok, bear with me. I was born in Roane County in 1924. Before this in 1923, meningitis came to the area and I lost two little sisters. One was three and a half and the other was eight months, and this is my three and a half’s ring. Alright so in 1924, I was born. I must have been a bundle of joy after that. But in 1925, my father died with tuberculosis.
Now I have a survivor story. My hero is my mother, Addie Reed Magill. She had so much faith in God, a devout Christian, a wonderful neighbor. Henrietta can vouch for that. And like Henrietta said, she instilled the values of life into all of us - hard work, treat your neighbor right, be a friend to everybody, you’ll make it, study and work. That was it. All of these deaths happened, by the way, in the month of March. So I think my mom would have like to have torn out the month of March from all the calendars. But then we moved to Robertsville when I was 10 years old. My mom aired, also washed and dried, and folded clothes for John Rice Irwin’s grandparents- the Rev. John and his lovely wife who was such a joy. Also for the Locketts and they had a son who is a doctor (inaudible) just passed away not long ago. My mother could have been a pioneer on a covered wagon going west. She was very strong she was an excellent cook she was a seamstress, she was a third grade student, but she was self-taught. She could write, there was always an open Bible in the house. Bible reading was an everyday thing.
When we came to Robertsville, we lived on Henrietta’s dad’s farm for a while with my oldest sister and my brother-in-law, who were tenants on the farm. In fact, my brother-in-law, Ralph Mead, went to Wheat High School and played six man football there. My oldest sister, his wife, graduated from Wheat High School. She had an injury when she was young and was cripple, but she on crutches finished high school, graduated from Wheat High school in 1930. She was not handicapped because she could do just about anything she wanted to do.
Back to Robertsville, main street Robertsville, and my heroes there were my teachers. I had some wonderful people cross my path and I am so grateful. Two of those were Henrietta’s sisters- Lucille Peck Hill was such a wonderful teacher and she should have been a missionary. I think at one time had inclinations to be a missionary, but she was a teacher in more than just school subjects. She had our first Vacation Bible School that I attended when I was 11 years old. Henrietta’s sister, Mildred, was my English Literature teacher. Mildred loved music. I always loved music. She organized a choral club at in our high school, at Robertsville. She also had me singing in a trio. And some of the other people that were real important along main street Robertsville I remember Vera Hightower was one that helped me in music. Her dad was a minister. He had been in an accident, something to do with mining and had both hands blown off. I remember that family well. The Roberts, Louise Roberts, on main street Robertsville, was one of my teachers. That was from an old family right Henrietta. George Anderson from just (inaudible) between Robertsville and Scarboro, was an instrumental. His family was in my life. He had a teacher, a sister, Ora. There are teachers all around. There were more teachers in this area. I am sure the percentage is very high for educators.
MRS. ZUCKER: Was taking an educational role a way to move up the socioeconomic ladder for a lot of people in the area? Was that the direction?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Possibly, yes.
MR. WRIGHT: My mother was a teacher at Wheat.
MRS. ZUCKER: Any teachers in any of your families? This is the teacher table over here. And your mother and your sisters and you were a teacher. So something about this region inspired it.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Your brother was a teacher.
REV. WRIGHT: My mother and three brothers were school teachers. Had a set of twin brothers, Max and Rex, both graduated from Carson Newman after they got out of the service. My mother had taught earlier before the children had started growing up. She went back and renewed her teacher’s certificate with the twin brothers at Carson Newman. She taught then until she retired. And of course the twins have retired. Albert, my brother next to me older, he also was a teacher.
MRS. ZUCKER: While you are speaking, tell a little bit about, because I know you have quite an interesting story about going to school yourself about transportation to school and that way you can talk a little bit about transportation. I know we have a story here that is fun.
REV. WRIGHT: We didn’t have the nice buses they have today of course. They just bought the running gears off a truck. A ton and a half just had the motor and the hood. They build the rest of it. Had curtains about that high. You could stand up. I suppose it was about five feet maybe, and they had curtains all around the sides that could be rolled up or down. There was a bench, just a plank around each side and maybe partly across the back. They had an emergency door.
George Rheafield drove our bus. I guess he drove about 15 miles in all. He’d start about three miles above the Bethel Church and Bethel Valley turned off there and went into a little community called Park City. And where they got its name, there were people who had relocated from Smoky Mountain National Park. There was a family of Prophets, and two families of Prices, and two or three families of Rheafields, and a family of Huskys. And they came on up Bethel Valley and turned down to my place there. We went down to Freel’s Bend on the River Road and I had to back track down from Gallaher Ferry. They went down to Gallaher Ferry almost and then back and then came on around Freel’s Bends. Huddlesons, Shepards, Freels.
MRS. ZUCKER: I hope you all eventually write down all the names of all the families that you can remember and get them onto paper. It seems to me that there is such a valuable record of history right here at this table. Reba, your…
MR. WRIGHT: I did that before I came here.
MRS. ZUCKER: I noticed you did that write those down and I bet you could be coerced into giving people copies.
MR. WRIGHT: Shoot girl. Sure thing. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: It is a very nice write up about Raoul’s history here. Before we leave school buses, I want to point out that Reba’s father drove a school bus and a lot of you rode on that school bus, some of you did maybe. And he had to buy his own bus, didn’t he?
MRS. HOLMBERG: Yes, he had a contract with the county, and in fact, I guess he owned two or three buses and had drivers. He had to buy his own buses. I don’t know if he did well or not, but he was quite the taskmaster of the bus. In those days, if a kid misbehaved, he would make them get off the bus out in the county. I can’t imagine the consequences of doing that today. I’ve heard many people say, “Well, Andy put me off the bus out in the middle of nowhere.”
MRS. ZUCKER: (Laughter) So there may be people wondering around there still.
MRS. HOLMBERG: That’s right. (Laughter)
MR. TUNNELL: He was a wonderful fella, perhaps one of the most popular people that lived in our community. He let us call him Andy. We would attend basketball games and he took us out to Knoxville on time.
AUDIENCE: Microphone.
MR. TUNNELL: I said her father, we all called him Andy, the driver, was one of the most popular and most wonderful people I ever met. I loved him to death. He always let me sit right up beside him and talked to him all the time. That’s probably why he didn’t put me off. We talked about the principal at Robertsville High School. We’d talk about going on a trip and he would tell me how much it was going to be. Andy would always talk to me about this. He’d say that the principle said, “I don’t think we can come out on that, on that amount of money”. And so Andy he’d say, “Well, we got a trip we can come out on, so we’ll go into Knoxville.” (Laughter) We had a wonderful time with him. He was a great gentleman.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I want to say one other thing about my dad which concerns teachers. He was on the school board for this area and in those days teachers didn’t have tenure. So in the summertime, we would have a parade of teachers come by the house to make sure their job was secure in the fall
MRS. ZUCKER: Did they bring any offerings like cakes?
MRS. HOLMBERG: Maybe under the table. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: Very good. I want to just go back to Mr. Tunnell just a minute. We are going to run out of time, unbelievable, it goes so fast. I would like you to paint if you can and I think you are the right person to do it, but please join in, a kind of political picture of Anderson County before the buyout. What was the county like politically? What was the structure like?
MR. TUNNELL: Before the what?
MRS. ZUCKER: Before Oak Ridge.
MR. TUNNELL: Well, actually I don’t think there was really anything much around except the Republicans and the Baptists at that time. (Laughter)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Amen!
MRS. ZUCKER: Were they part of the same…
MR. TUNNELL: I heard someone say “Amen” here. (Laughter) I remember one time when I was just a little boy and we were having an election. One of the candidates for sheriff, I was up at the jail. That was my first experience with politics. This of course was a dry county there was not any booze around, but you would walk through the jail there and I noticed they were handing up through the floor there. If you got a bottle of that liquor you were suppose to vote for a particular person. (Laughter) It was interesting.
We had a handsome young fella from over in the mountain area, named McClee Daugherty. He looked like Marshall Dillon and he ran for Sheriff of the county and was elected. He went back to that little community. I think it was Charlie’s Branch, and back in that area. He knew where all these stills were, because everybody had a still. I remember when Mother and I would go to the mill, we would walk along just what’s part of Oak Ridge right now. One of their dogs would bring the cows in and we would see people, you know where their stills are down there. Mother would speak to them and call them Samsbush and so forth. Just like, well you know, they were business men that had a real good business. (Laughter) A lot of people came in from Knoxville and bought the moonshine. McClee went back to raid and he hadn’t been the sheriff long, but when they came back they brought him back in a casket because they killed him over there. It was kind of a dangerous occupation to have.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well even when I…
MR. TUNNELL: We had a very colorful shirt that Uncle Bob Smith. He was Buzz Elkins, I guess about everyone has heard of Buzz the highway-ist. He was his grandfather, I believe. He always walked around without a gun. I remember I was just down there on the ridge on what is part of my farm. The farm from the old Tunnell place. He raided there that day. He stood there and said to the fella, he said “Sammy-boy I believe everything is clean here now. You’re out of business.” He said, “Yes, you’re right. I just quit.” And so just as he walked off, he took his foot and pushed the leaves back and he had a barrel there with that mash in there that they use to make liquor with. He said, “He’s not a very good observer I can see, but he’s a good sheriff.” (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: When I first came to Anderson County which was 1944, there was still a lot of, let’s say territorial warfare going on back up the hills. There was periodically a shooting. It usually turned out to be over land and property. But probably stills had something to do with it, I would say.
MR. TUNNELL: Definitely did.
MRS. ZUCKER: It was a business problem you might say. What were your memories of political life of the region, Raoul? Do you have any memories?
MR. WRIGHT: We lived on the farm over there…
AUDIENCE: Mic!
MRS. ZUCKER: Sorry, thank you.
MR. WRIGHT: We lived on a farm over by the river and there weren’t any politics over there at all. No one even hardly knew we were there. We had a large farm over there. We were a real close-knit family. At 960 acres, it took a lot of people to work the farm. Aunts and uncles and kids and everything. Everybody worked. Everybody had a job to do. The only time we about leave there would be to go to Clinton or Knoxville, about once a month for a few supplies and always to church on Sunday. We went to a church over by X-10. The church there that was a Baptist church that we went to. The most memorable thing was when the Army came to take the farm.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I was just about to get there. I have one question before we get to talking about that. I think it is time that we do so. I know that you described health problems in your family, in your lost members. How did people take care of themselves medically? Where were the medical centers and how did that work?
MRS. HOLMBERG: I can answer that. In the beginning, we had one of the only telephones in the area. So many people came to our house for emergency phone calls. Possibly a baby was coming because all babies were born at home at that time, including my sister and I. Possibly for the undertaker because the nearest hospital was in Knoxville and not many people took advantage of that, of the hospital. The closest doctors were in Oliver Springs. They were Dr. Wallard, Dr. Hayes, and Dr. Hecker, and they all made house calls. I remember once my great-grandmother putting an onion poultice on an infection that my grandfather had. So they used home remedies. That’s what I know about the medical profession.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, I think your family, Daws, had a lot to do with herbal remedies, as I remember.
MR. BRIDGES: With what?
MRS. ZUCKER: Herbal remedies. You once told me that you went out and picked things.
MR. BRIDGES: Yeah. Yeah.
MRS. ZUCKER: What were some of medicines that you used?
MR. BRIDGES: My daddy was a hunter and we always, he was a bee hunter, too. He, Rice Irwin, he sat right in front of me in Robertsville School, him and David did, you know. Rice, when I go up there now he says, “I want to tell you your daddy was the best bee hunter.” He had a hive, watch those bees go up to the branches somewhere where the creek was at and he could watch them and he said they went round and round and round like that. I watched them too. Then they set a beeline straight to a tree way up in the mountain. He’d take a few minutes and find it. He’d make a big cross mark on there if it hadn’t been marked or somebody found it and they made a cross mark with their knives, you know. He would go back and cut them, you know. We use to have big lard cans full of honey and give honey away.
MRS. ZUCKER: But you didn’t use that for medicine.
MR. BRIDGES: What?
MRS. ZUCKER: You didn’t use that for medicine, did you?
MR. BRIDGES: No.
MRS. ZUCKER: But you did, tell me some other things that you used.
MR. BRIDGES: You could use it for medicine too.
MR. WRIGHT: You could mix it with sulfur.
MRS. ZUCKER: Mix it with sulfur.
MR. BRIDGES: You could mix it with vinegar and a little salt. I still use it for a sore throat. And put a spoonful of honey or two down in there, and then gargle it. You can drink a little of it and its real good. Honey is good for you.
MRS. ZUCKER: I have a cold right now.
MR. BRIDGES: We used a lot of herbs like golden seal and ginseng. I still take golden seal about every morning. I buy it up here at Jackson Square, it’s in a powder.
MRS. ZUCKER: But you don’t go out to the woods and hunt it any more. You go down to the store and buy it?
MR. BRIDGES: I got a hundred or two buckets sitting there in my woods now. I have fooled with a lot of wildflowers and raised a big garden. I raised too much. I got about two bushel of beans about to turn the truck over. I can give some of them and get rid of some of them today.
MRS. ZUCKER: Make a note to meet him in the parking lot.
MR. BRIDGES: I’ve got two bushel there in the truck. I like to work. My wife has asked me why I don’t stop working. A lot of times a dark will bring me home from working and what I’m doing. I’ve got hundreds of plants down there from where I had that nursery, you know. I grow ginseng down there. I got golden seal down there. There are so many different types of herbs, you know. You can make tea out of pennyroyal.
MRS. ZUCKER: Did you all use herbs, herbal medicines?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Castor oil is good.
MRS. ZUCKER: Do what?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Castor oil.
MRS. ZUCKER: Castor oil.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Epsom salts, Black drought.
MR. WRIGHT: Cod liver oil.
MRS. BRUMMITT: The first aspirin I had was in high school. When I was a freshman in high school was my first aspirin. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: Ok, let’s move on to the pre-Oak Ridge story. Do you all remember the first moment you knew you were going to be moved from your land? Raoul, tell me the first knowledge you had of that.
MR. WRIGHT: The Army came to the farm, had a, maybe a piece of paper like this, and told them they wanted to buy the farm. Well my grandpa said the farm wasn’t for sale.
MRS. ZUCKER: Pull the mic a little closer.
MR. WRIGHT: Ok, said the farm wasn’t for sale. They said, “Ok, well, we’re here buying all the farms.” We were the last family to leave Oak Ridge. And we didn’t go out the gate; they shipped us across the river. They came two weeks before they condemned it, they came and got all the firearms, they took every one of them. Not the hand guns, but all the long ones. They took all those. My grandfather kept going to the county court and the Clinton Engineering Works wondering why they had to have his farm because it was next to river. It wasn’t close to anything. So anyway--
MRS. ZUCKER: And of course there was no explanation for why they were taking it.
MR. WRIGHT: No. Absolutely not. So when they came to evict us, they brought a barge and the river was high. The river fluctuated quite a bit. The river was high and they brought a barge and loaded everything there was in the whole farm. Moved it across the river to the bank of Hickory Creek and set it out. And the rest of us, we were the last ones on the barge across the river. So we built tents and camped out over there. Every time they thought the Army left he would start heading back across the river. (Laughter) They always kept the MP’s over there because they knew he was going to keep coming back. (Laughter) That went on for several months. They finally came in and destroyed the whole farm. We had a new house, big house. They went and bulldozed it down and all the barns, everything they completely destroyed it, the whole farm. Except for the old silo and this old silo is still there. It is all covered with Kudzu now.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now where is it exactly?
MR. WRIGHT: It’s behind X-10 on the river. It’s right across where you go down the valley over there, what they call Hickory Creek. Hardin Valley comes out right at the river. It’s right up on the hill.
MRS. ZUCKER: Such beautiful land. Beautiful land.
MR. WRIGHT: It is pretty land. I was there about 10 years ago and I went down the river and the silo was still there. It’s the only thing they didn’t destroy.
MRS. ZUCKER: Henrietta, tell me about your first memory of the …
MRS. WINTENBERG: Well, there were flags all in the fields and along the roads and in the fields. My mother saw them, saw some men putting the flags and she asked them, “What are you doing?” She had been across the road to the orchard. We not only had lots of farm crops and everything, but also had across the road from our house, an orchard.
If you are going from the beginning to the Turnpike down toward K-25, or down toward Oliver Springs, you would see between the Lutheran Church and the Methodist Church, one pear tree, it is getting a little raggy now. It has some rotten limbs, I have noticed. But for years there were pears, it bloomed white, and there were pears on that tree. When you see that pear tree you know you’re standing on the Peck ground. And the Principal or the people I would tell would laugh about it. I thought it was fun; I just wanted them to know where I grew up.
So, finally at the church, I guess, people told that the government is going to take the land. The Army is coming in here to take the land. Why in the world would they want Robertsville for? We didn’t dream that they were going to take 56,000 acres. Possible more than that they took. Anyways, she became the more and more worried. I started back to UT. Of course the schools had begun to close. So, I would come home and my mother would just be, “What am I going to do?”, because my brother had gone to the service, the older brothers and sisters were all away and graduated from college and gone. My brother was going into the Air Corps. Our tenant was already working for Mr. Copeland then, the Copeland Store.
My mother finally decided that if she had to leave, she had to leave. I think they slipped a little note under the door possibly in the middle of October, or the first of November. But anyhow, she had a short time to get out. Cows, it was a farm, a working farm. But, we always had three or four horses; three or four milk cows; lots of calves.
In fact, when my father died in ’37, my mother had no idea how many young yearlings or calves that he had. She didn’t know because her job was with seven children, and to the chores around the home, and the canning, and see after the home. So here was my mom with all these things with old, rakes with sizes of all kinds, all kinds of tools, a barn full of everything, so she just finally started doing the best she could.
She first found a house, she thought, that had a barn and had some things, and she was going to take it. But then this man came back, even though she had signed and given him 500 or so, and he said, “Here is your check.” He said, “I can’t take it because I have a lady how has a…,” I forgotten if it was crippled or mentally handicapped son, “…and I’m going to let her have it.” Well, my mother was devastated, but, you know, once people said no, they say no, and she came back home.
Finally, we moved to a house in South Clinton. It did have an acre or two of land. So she could take a few chickens; she could take things. It had a huge basement. One of my sisters, she use to say, “You should see that basement. It’s stacked and stacked and tripled stacked,” she’d say. But anyhow we finally got moved there. And then from there we bought a newer home in Clinton because we were all tired of my mother having to carry coal or wood. And so this house had electric heat. It was a wonderful thing for her and for me because I was, as I said, the one left. My brother needed to finish school and to go to college.
And by the way, my dad use to always say, “Don’t be a farmer. It is very hard work, you don’t get anything. You will work from dawn until after dark.” You know, my brother graduated from the university, got a master’s degree and worked for TVA in the fertilizer division. And all of the sudden we hear he and his wife were buying a farm down in the Sweetwater Valley. We all shook our heads and said, “Surely not!” (Laughter) But he is still living there and he has loved it.
MRS. ZUCKER: So, the farm blood still ran…
MRS. WINTENBERG: Through him, but not me.
MRS. ZUCKER: Reba, do you remember the moment of eviction?
MRS. HOLMBERG: No, I was in school and I wasn’t on top of all the trauma. But my folks moved nearby and we still have that farm over by Tri-County Center. The medical center built a hospital on the spot where our farm house was.
But while I have the floor I would like to read something about what writers said of this valley. This is from June’s class. Daniel Lang’s book called Early Tales of the Atomic Age. He said, “Scarboro, Wheat, and Robertsville are names of vanished places where the hill folk of this region went in for what amounted to non-profit farming, some tobacco plants, a couple of hogs, some poultry, perhaps a head or two of cattle, and a little moonshine making.” He went on to say, “The Army Engineers and Contractors arrived on the scene in 1942, and went to work on the scrappy, unattractive, particularly routerless terrain, and quails roamed the place, and the guards picked off skunks with their rifles.” Not a very nice picture of the area.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I think it is beautiful land.
MRS. WINTENBERG: Let me tell you about our farm. Our farm, my father always grew. It was 180 acres. Let’s see, it came from the Olivers. My grandmother, or great-grandmother, Amelia, I’m getting lost here. We’ve been looking up so much of my genealogy and it has gone so far back and back. There was a lot of land from the Olivers, but apparently, as different ones took it, a grandfather and then maybe even on down. My father didn’t sell any. But it had been like a 1,260 acre tract of land. But when my dad got it, it was around 180, up and down the Turnpike. My father enjoyed farming. In fact, an uncle told me in long years after my father was gone, but what my dad had that no one else seemed to have in the family, was contentment. I said, “What do you mean ‘contentment’?” He said, “He loved farming; he loved you kids; he loved his wife.” Of course he had had two or three wives, so maybe he didn’t know what he was talking about. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: It wasn’t for long.
MRS. WINTENBERG: But anyhow, there were all his corn cribs, one or two corn cribs filled with corn. We had bad years. We had flooded years where things were sort of wiped out. We always had lots and lots of corn, oats, wheat. It was a real farming farm. My father took loads of wheat in big white sacks. I can see them. A truck would come in and load them and he would take them to Jail and Smith in Knoxville and trade them for flour. It was sort of a barter. You did this, for this. We always had chickens, a hen house, and a young chicken house. The children helped with all the milking, three or four cows to milk. As soon as we got home from school, we would put our sweater and skirt or whatever, and went out to shell the corn and do things, milk the cows, and so on. My dad had cash crops. He had things that he sold for cash. He grew tobacco. “Don’t ever get into tobacco, its poisonous. Why do you think I keep three or four leaves down in this barrel? It’s poisonous. You don’t get into tobacco.” We said, “But you…”
MRS. ZUCKER: “You’re growing it.”
MRS. WINTENBERG: “You’re growing it and you use it.” “Well,” he said, “Brother 15 taught a little 11 year old brother. I don’t believe I was 11, maybe 10, to chew.” He said, “Don’t get into tobacco, at all. It is a bad thing.”
MRS. ZUCKER: I can’t imagine moving all that stuff. That’s really amazing.
MRS. WINTENBERG: This was back in the ‘20’s. Well anyhow, we grew all these things. My father always had tomatoes to sell. Sometimes we had a little place near our garage, where they could come of Highway 61. We would put watermelons there, bushels of peaches. I well remember one sister one time told a man, she told him, “These watermelons are a quarter and these are fifty cents.” So, he gave her two quarters and picked up the biggest two melons. “No,” she said, she just went and stood right in front of him and said, “No, you have the wrong melons.” She said, “Put them down.” He kept going to his car. She ran over to him again and she said, “Put. Them. Down.” Finally, he came back and put them down and reached in his pocket and gave her another. Well, he said, “Give me back my quarters,” and he gave her a dollar. So, then he took two of the large melons.
MRS. ZUCKER: I’d like to get back since we are so short on time, if you don’t mind. I would like to get back to the experience of being kicked off your land. I think that is a huge emotional experience for everyone, I think. Yes, please, talk about that.
MRS. BRUMMITT: (inaudible)
MRS. ZUCKER: Microphone, please. Thank you.
MRS. BRUMMIT: Thank you. At the time that they came in to take the property in Oak Ridge, my mom and I were living with J. Nash Copeland and Wynneta. I’m sure a lot of you know that. My mom and I lived with them for four years while I was in high school. okay, their property was taken, was condemned. My mom had been the caretaker for the boys and had helped them in the store and everything. So, they would no longer have a store and would no longer have a need for domestic help. So, they moved. My mom and I had to move in with my oldest sister and her husband. My mom still owned 40 acres of land in Roane County. I don’t know how she was notified that they were taking the land. I do know that they offered 450 dollars for 40 acres of land. So she went to court. The attorney, Sam Carson was the attorney and they upped it to 900 dollars. However, there was no will. My father had no will. Here he had six heirs. We all got 125 dollars.
MRS. ZUCKER: Do you remember how much your daddy was paid, Daws?
MR. BRIDGES: We had about 60 acres and we got 1200 dollars for it and we just built a new house and a barn and he was satisfied and he said, “You boys, a lot of you have got to go the Army. There is going to an awful big war, and everything going on.” He said that is the purpose that they told us, what they were building here, you know. It was a secret, you know, they kept it secret and there was no telling what they were going to build. They got the atomic bomb, but (inaudible) it’s going to be. So he went ahead and took the 1200 dollars and we located, he located up behind the creek up there. But I know that he didn’t complain about it. He’d say if it wasn’t enough. The Children’s Museum, our property come up close to his, from Key Springs area, that road down there, and I remember we had eight acres of corn and I remember my daddy, I’m going to get up a minute and walk. We had a little old job (inaudible). My daddy plowed all day, (inaudible) the corn (inaudible) I know it had one grain in it (inaudible) he’d be like that all day planting that corn (inaudible) you drop a bean (inaudible) we done that after the corn plowed the first time so it wouldn’t break the corn down. We had beans and beans and beans.
MRS. ZUCKER: And they are still out in the parking lot.
MR. BRIDGES: What?
MRS. ZUCKER: And they are still out in the parking lot. Would you like to sit down now? They are still out in the parking lot. There are beans out in that parking lot. (Laughter)
MR. BRIDGES: (inaudible) every time you do that (inaudible) we were satisfied.
MRS. ZUCKER: What was your story? Do you remember when you got the notice that you had to move off of the land?
REV. WRIGHT: No, I don’t. I had gone overseas.
MRS. ZUCKER: You were overseas and just couldn’t find it when you got back.
REV. WRIGHT: I remember one thing though. You know we live through all kinds of (inaudible) when I was a child (inaudible) then we got a (inaudible) and then finally (inaudible) just drove through the field and combined it. We cut it; we thrashed it; and poured it out into a bag, so from a cradle to a combine, we lived this generation.
MRS. ZUCKER: I would like to ask one final question because I know our time is running out and that is do any of you remember exactly the moment when you learned what had been made in Oak Ridge and where you were when the bomb was dropped. I know Reba does. Bring the microphone over.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I worked in the chemistry lab and we worked with an element called tipoloy and we used it in the equation S T. And I learned from the molecular way that it was uranium. But I had no clue of the consequences. So a friend and I were in Florida on vacation and in the war time, all coastal cities were blacked out, but I guess we were stir crazy that night. So, we decided to sneak out in the middle of the night and go swimming in the ocean. The landlady heard us and she came and said if we had been apprehended by the coast guard, she would have been in trouble and would have lost her permit.
Well, the next morning, the announcement of the dropping of the bomb was all over the front pages. She became quite excited and called the newspaper office and said we have people right here under my roof from Oak Ridge. So, a photographer and a reporter came out and interviewed us and we were splashed on the front page the next day, saying, “Girls in Oak Ridge helped to build Atom Bomb”. (Laughter) So we went from being in the dog house to celebrities overnight. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: (Laughter) Mr. Tunnell, do you remember the moment?
MR. TUNNELL: Yes ma’am. I was in Casablanca. I was in the Army at that particular time. One thing I would like to point out here that, have we talked about integration or segregation at all?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I’m sorry we didn’t get to that because it’s important.
MR. TUNNELL: We had three or four black families in the community at that time. They would come over to our house, or we would go over to their house. By the way, I went through all these things that these people are talking about. Doing work on the farm and all. But these colored people, we’d call them and they would come over to our home. We didn’t know what integration or segregation meant then because they’d come and eat with us, or we’d eat with them, you know, and never thought anything about it. They had their own church up there. I would get up there and act like I was preaching in their church. It was up there where Orange Lane is now.
MRS. ZUCKER: Where I live.
MR. TUNNELL: That area right there that Sam Carter and Hank Dicey Griffin and that group. They fish down there a lot in the Poplar Creek where my farm runs through there. And now it runs through the farm. They were wonderful people. If we had the same race relationship then as we have, if we had it now like we did then, it would be a lot better world. They were just such wonderful, wonderful people.
MRS. ZUCKER: Thank you for bring that up.
MR. TUNNELL: I was in Casablanca. That’s where I was. I was over there on a special assignment for the Army.
MRS. ZUCKER: I have one more question and then I think we are out of time. But I wanted to give Mrs. Wintenberg a chance to describe the cemetery and what has happened to it. Because I think that is kind of sad. It’s a sad story, but it’s an interesting one to end on.
AUDIENCE: Microphone.
MRS. WINTENBERG: I worked at Willow Brook School and back of Willow Brook School was the cemetery for lots and lots of people who lived. Reba’s grandparents…
MRS. HOLMBERG: My great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, my sisters were all laid there.
MRS. WINTENBERG: Lots and lots of people were buried there. My mother’s parents and there are grandparents and there was also a huge stone for Collin Roberts. And many times one of the fifth or sixth grade teachers would come and she’d say we have been studying. We are trying to finalize somethings and we would like for you to come and tell us more about Oak Ridge. So they would get me. The young children that I was working with would go home at 2:40, and they would come and ask me to come to their room so that I could tell them what was here and why this cemetery was over there. This was a little Baptist church, and I guess it was the main Baptist church. My grandfather had given the land for the school. I don’t know whether that included the Baptist church or not.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, what has happened to cemetery now?
MRS. WINTENBERG: The cemetery, each year that we would go I would see a little more mowed, and a little more plowed under. The first thing was there was somebody wanted a road on the right side of the church. So they proceeded to make one. That took about the first row of graves, tomb stones and all. And then there would be this huge pile of tomb stones and when you walked back here would be the label Crozier, here would be all the people, Jetts, Fosters, Albrights.
Finally, I said to myself, “You have got to do something.” First, I called the AEC and they said, “They don’t have the cemeteries anymore.” So then I called the City and asked to speak to someone in charge of the cemeteries and the mowing. This man very generously answered and he said, “We don’t care. We don’t know anything about them. We don’t care anything about them. Nobody knows who those people were. They are long ago dead.” And I said, “Yes, I know that but I care about them and I want to know them.” He said, “Well Lady, it’s done, just live with it.” And I was still sort of perturbed about it.
So eventually I thought I’ll go to see him instead of just talking on the phone. I’ve never been very good at talking on the phone. So, I went down and as I went in I saw this man sneaking out, but of course I didn’t know that this was the man I had come to see. Well, when I went in, she said, “Oh, he’s just stepped out a moment. Have a seat.” So I sat and I sat and I sat. So I went up fifteen or twenty minutes, and I said, “Where is he?” “Well, he’s gone to talk with someone.” And I said, “But I had called,” I said, “Did he not know?” She said, “He possibly did,” and then she said, “He just doesn’t want to comment about it anymore, just doesn’t want to speak of it anymore.”
MRS. ZUCKER: When I was a kid, I use to go around the cemeteries around Oak Ridge and just read the stones. It was like a group of magical people that I really wanted to know about.
MR. WRIGHT: They were suppose to keep up the cemeteries from now on. That was the promise we had that it would always be taken care of. Some still do get mowed sometimes.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Especially around Decoration Day.
MRS. WINTENBERG: It was fine to mow, but they left a grassy spot. They didn’t mow in between.
MRS. ZUCKER: Our time is up. I am so sorry. I know that every one of you has a story that could fill another hour and a half at least. And I am sorry that I didn’t give all of you more time to talk. But thank you so much for what talking you have done. I really appreciate it.
(Applause)
[End of Video]

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ORICL Panel, Part 3: Robertsville and Scarboro Communities
“The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and Early Oak Ridge”
Interviewed by Joan-Ellen Zucker
July 17, 2000
Transcribed by Jordan Reed
MR. KOLB: Thank you Pat. I’m Jim Kolb, and I’m an officer in the newly formed Oak Ridge Heritage and Preservation Association (ORHPA), and you all are a perfect host. As you have probably seen in the newspaper, our one main project, our first main project is the preservation of the old Senior Center or Wildcat Den. I would like to just briefly catch you up to date on why our organization was founded and where we are going. About a year ago or two, Cheyenne Hall fell down by the hospital on the (Oak Ridge) Turnpike. That galvanized a huge number of people in Oak Ridge to say, “What’s going to be left when we start knocking down all our original buildings?”
So, one of our main projects of our new association is to preserve the World War II heritage of our buildings. There are only five as of now, only five public buildings left in Oak Ridge. The Wildcat Den, Senior Citizen Center, the Alexander Hotel, the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) research building on Illinois Avenue, the original Energy Museum on Jefferson Avenue, and the American Red Cross building which was the original housing office. Those five are the only ones left. And they could all be gone in a matter of years. So that’s one of our main projects.
The second one is we have started an oral history project. What’s an oral history project? This means we want to document. We have started it. It’s happening, to document the history of Oak Ridgers, also pre-Oak Ridgers, by the way, not just Oak Ridge, but the pre-Oak Ridge communities are included. Wheat and Anderson County, etc. We want the people that were here, the people that came here, the children that were raised here of which many are in the audience. We want your reflections on your life in Oak Ridge and these will all be preserved in a formal way. We have made arrangements with the Center for Research on War and History, I believe it is, over at UT (University of Tennessee), which is a national center to use their facilities and any regards to. The easy part is getting the oral history on tape. This just lets people talk and we have a very well organized interview form for doing that, but the hard part, the costly part is to transcribe that into a written document. That is really what is important so that historians can actually look at the written word of these people and use these histories.
And that comes to a third part. That is to gather mementos and artifacts of Oak Ridge, early Oak Ridge, pre-Oak Ridge into another museum facility here in Oak Ridge. I’ll close with the statement that we have several forms and I will be back at the back when you close which I will be glad to hand you, but going back to the oral history, the main reason for fundraising, asking for your membership is that there will be a cost involved with doing these transcriptions. This is going to be hours, hundreds of hours of transcribing time over years. Thousands of hours I should say, and this may require a paid transcriber who does this professionally. So we have membership forms in the back. Membership starts at $20 per family. I will be back in the back and I will enlist your all’s support. Thank you.
MS. CLARK: I wanted to tell you a little bit about, well first of all, the handout you have is the first two pages of a Declaration of Taking. This came from Reba Holmberg. And that gives you an idea of some of the paper work involved. She also had brought in a Xerox of a permission, this is in March of ’43 for a J.A. Freels to come back and remove some of his property that he had left, apparently, when he moved and there is a sample of that in the back. I have samples of maps up there and I’m going to hold a couple down here so that everybody doesn’t have to rush up there to see it, but this is a map of the Robertsville area again. Reba brought this to me, identifying places and on the map in back, I have circled in red the places that the homesteads site which is now, for example, where the Civic Center is, or where the high school is. Because this is something that I have tried to visualize what was here before and I think this helps a lot and there is a map, this map back there. I also have and I had this last week.
The Kingston Demolition Range map that was done by TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) on instructions from the Army when they came and they told TVA that they wanted this segment, this segment, and this segment put together in one map and TVA then said, “Call the Army”. And they said, “We like to name our maps. What should we call our map?” They said, “The Kingston Demolition Range”. So, that was the first name of Oak Ridge before Clinton Engineer Works.
Our panel today is from Anderson County area of pre-Oak Ridge and Joan-Ellen Zucker, whom I had introduced earlier with John Rice Irwin. Joan-Ellen is going to be moderating this panel.
MRS. ZUCKER: Am I on? I have one question, should people move these microphones towards them, Pat. I wasn’t here before.
MS. CLARK: [answer off camera]
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I guess we will scoot them around and if some of you can’t hear, please don’t hesitate to announce that fact because I want you to be able to hear it all. I am so happy to be here with this wonderful looking group of people. And I would like to ask the, each person to introduce themselves. And we will start with Mr. Tunnell at the corner. Just tell us who you are, and a little bit about yourself, and go around the table and we will see where we get. Can’t have the whole hour, everybody, ok, just for introductions. Yes, sir.
MR. TUNNELL : I didn’t realize that any particular subject you asked us to speak on. I just know I was here when the war was declared. I was going to Robertsville High School and I do know that after I graduated there, they tore a part of the building down. Every school that I ever attended they’ve torn the building down. Marlow School, University of Tennessee Law School. So that tells you something about my character.
This gentleman just spoke here a minute ago, apparently there are some things about Oak Ridge that he doesn’t know that a lot of us do know. I am in one of the buildings here that he didn’t mention. We call it the Tunnell Building, prior to my going to law school, they called it Tunnel, but they added the Tunnell on after I graduated from law school, especially when I went to Harvard a while. (Laughter) But the Tunnell Building was the old Eastman Building, and I appreciate the fact that I have fixed it up so nice that they think that it is a modern, new building. People do come in and make that comment.
I graduated along with Naomi in 1942 with the last group to graduate from Robertsville High School. My parents owned a farm over in the Marlow Community. We have been there, we at one time had 1000 acres of land from 61, where 61 (inaudible) merges, and then went on up in the Dossett Community. We owned up to the top of the ridge on West Outer.
MRS. ZUCKER: Can we come back to that and go around the table and find out where everybody is from? Let’s go one by one and find out what your brief history is in the region and where your original property was, where you originally lived. I think that would be interesting to everybody.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Thank you very much. I am Naomi Magill Brummitt. I was born in Roane County, Bear Creek Valley, which is below Y-12, in a log cabin. I am the seventh child of Frank Magill and Addie Reed Magill. I don’t know what my claim to fame is except I was the seventh child, the runt of the family.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, that’s pretty good. That’s good enough for me. Thank you.
MR. WRIGHT: I am Raoul Wright. And I am the descendent of David and Mary Jane Loveday. The farm is over behind X-10. It was a 960 acre farm, big farm. My mother taught school at Wheat. And I have been living in Oak Ridge all my life.
MRS. ZUCKER: I’m glad. And how about you, Mrs. Wintenberg?
MRS. WINTENBERG: My name is Henrietta Peck Wintenberg and I grew up in Robertsville. One of seven children. My relatives gave Robertsville its name. Collins Roberts was my mother’s great-great-grandfather. And Olivers, Olivers Springs was named for the Olivers on the Peck side. The first postmaster at Clinton, which was Burville in those days, was Arthur Crozier. My mother married a Crozier. I attended Robertsville High School, UT, LMU some, and I have a master’s from Peabody, which is now Vanderbilt University. I live right here in Oak Ridge. We built a home in Clinton and then we built a home in Emory Valley on Carnegie Drive. We have, I am the mother of two children. Our son, Dr. Alan Wintenberg works at ORNL, our daughter lives in Syracuse, New York. I taught in the Oak Ridge, six different elementary schools in Oak Ridge for thirty years and our old home place and farm was where, beginning on Vermont Avenue down by the Catholic School and Church, on down through the Lutheran Church, the Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and up by the Episcopal Church is the old Peck home place cemetery, and that is where my father is buried. Our farm also encompassed part of the mall. So it is very easy to find our home, our old farm. People tell me, “I can’t find your farm”. And I said, “Well, maybe it’s just covered up”.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I’m glad that we didn’t completely run you off when we bought out your farm. That’s good. A lot of people actually have stayed, I think. And Reba, tell me about your background.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I’m a fifth generation member of the Jet Lockett family who lived in the area. I graduated from Robertsville High School and the University of Tennessee with a BS degree in science. I came here to work for and as a junior chemist in the labs for Tennessee Eastman and the analytical labs at Y-12. I met Bob Holmberg, who was sent here in the SED as a scientist. We have lived in this, in Oak Ridge for fifty years. We have four children. Nancy Harrison, who you may know, she works in Oak Ridge still. Doug, who is in Kentucky, Connie, who lives in LA, and Eric, who lives in Lamoure, California.
MRS. ZUCKER: And Daws Bridges. Daws is my friend. He and I have actually done a videotaped life history of his. It’s very interesting, and I love to lend it.
MR. BRIDGES: She done told my name, Daws Bridges. I guess a lot of people even here that knows that I had a nursery up here at Elza Gate for about fifteen years seems like I worked for everybody and took down trees and this and that. But I lived here, walking distance of Robertsville and I graduated from a corn field. I didn’t graduate from no high school or anything like that. But there were 11 of us children and I mean we worked, and I still work, but works good for you. Keeps you healthy and everything. I even worked for this woman over here.
MRS. ZUCKER: He took down a tree in my yard last week. He still does it. (Laughter)
MR. BRIDGES: I’ve had a good life. I’ve enjoyed life and I am a Christian and I believe in God and I believe in the eternal everything about God and I am glad that I am here today. The first time I ever got to come out here, but it sounds like I might try to come out sometime. I remember the lawyer over there his building, I went in there and took finger prints. They finger printed me in there when I worked for Stone-Webster in 1942. I worked for them in the fall. I had a low badge number, about 156 and I still got it and got my picture on there. That was the place where they hired all their labor and everything in the building that he’s in there. I appreciate that he’s got it fixed up so pretty and everything around there, and I’ve been in it.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, tell me before we go on to Mr. Wright, Reverend Wright. Where was your home place here in Oak Ridge? I know you came through what I call the migration from TVA to Oak Ridge, but where is the place your farm was located?
MR. BRIDGES: My daddy he was a share cropper. So we moved from Lafollette up there, about ten miles out of Lafollette and we moved to Hilltop. That’s up where they call it Hilltop now, but they didn’t call it Hilltop then, they called it Black Top of Black Oak Ridge. Of course, that’s 61. And we lived there about four years and then we moved to a little below Key Springs. Most people know Key Springs, we lived down there. My daddy bought a little place down there. So we lived down there two years, or three, until they moved us out in ’42.
MRS. ZUCKER: And Mr. Reverend Wright, did you have that same kind of history? You came into this area? I’m talking to Mr. Wright now, Reverend Wright. You migrated too didn’t you?
REV. WRIGHT: I came from Norris Dam area.
MRS. ZUCKER: And tell us a little bit about yourself.
REV. WRIGHT: I’m Reverend Ernest Wright. I came to Anderson County as I said from the Norris dam area a little community by the name of Oakdale. A one room school for eight grades. We moved to Bethel Valley back in ’34, about two miles below Scarboro. And I lived in to Oak Ridge until ’42 and went into the Armed Services. Went to France and fought through France, Holland, and Belgium and back into Germany. That’s the story of my life. I’ve been a minister for 43 years, pastoring two different churches for 35 years, approximately. So, I too, have had a great life. I’ve enjoyed my life.
MRS. ZUCKER: Anybody here not have a great life? We should hear about it now. (Laughter) I’ve had a great life. I’m glad to be in good company. If I had come to this area in say 1920, what would be the most prominent names that come to mind. Who were the people that were, the names that I would know. Your family?
MR. TUNNELL: Definitely so. According to Katherine Hoskins, who wrote the history of Anderson County. My family was the first family in Anderson County.
MRS. ZUCKER: Pull the microphone over. Thank you.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I challenge that. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: Well good. Good thing we have them at separate tables. (Laughter)
MR. TUNNELL: Of course since she was born before 1920, she would probably know about that. (Laughter) But according to my people, the farm that we are on now, the farm that I own that is over in the Marlow Community that was actually a part of Oak Ridge, that was given or some kind of grant from the state of Virginia, or North Carolina, many, many years ago. That farm was there before Tennessee was even a state. So it’s been there a long time.
MRS. ZUCKER: So you are talking about what date?
MR. TUNNELL: I’m not sure what the date was.
MRS. ZUCKER: And the name would have been Tunnell?
MR. TUNNELL: Yes. At that time they pronounced it “tunnel”, everyone called it “tunnel”. But after I got a law degree and went to Harvard for a little while, they changed it to “Tunnell”.
MRS. ZUCKER: Good idea.
MR. TUNNELL: And that is what I have known up here in Oak Ridge. I’ll answer either one when anyone calls, especially if they got a good criminal case.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, you dispute what he has to say?
MRS. HOLMBERG: I don’t know dates either.
MRS. ZUCKER: Pull the microphone over would you. I’m louder than anybody else.
MRS. HOLMBERG: Our grandson, Andrew, who is a rising senior at the high school, is a seventh generation of the Jet Lockett family that were born in this area.
MRS. ZUCKER: So we have Tunnell, Jet Lockett. What are some of the other names?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Melton, my grandparents, Melton Hill Dam. I don’t know the dates.
MRS. ZUCKER: Do any of you know where your families immigrated from originally?
MRS. HOLMBERG: My family came from Covington, England. They settled in a busy port in Virginia and eventually drifted down to a spot on Poplar Creek, down near Dyllis, and then moved into this area.
MRS. ZUCKER: Mr. Bridges did you tell me that you knew that your family originally came from English stock?
MR. BRIDGES: England and Scot, yeah. I was thinking about the man talking about the old buildings here. I think I know another old building out here at Grove Center. It use to be Lockett’s Store. I think part of it is still there. They have fixed it up a lot there. Then the little Red Cross building, he named it, I know a boy we use to stop there and pick up. His name was Raines and that little house belong to the Raines up there on up the road if I’m not mistaken. Of course that little Red Cross building is still up there and I think if we got any of these old buildings I think they ought to be fixed up instead of tearing them down. I don’t live in Oak Ridge. I live in Roane County. But I’m for it 100 percent to keep these buildings.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, you’ve got some pretty good company.
MR. BRIDGES: We should have a lot more than what we got.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I would like to add one building that is standing and that is the auditorium at the Robertsville high school. Just before Oak Ridge was taken over, we got our first indoor toilets in the new gym at that location and when they took down the school at Robertsville Middle School, they left the old, new gym, the old place now, and it is now the auditorium at Robertsville Middle School.
MRS. ZUCKER: I went to school at what was then Jefferson Junior High School and remember that auditorium well.
MR. TUNNELL: That’s when Naomi and I graduated from high school, there in that gym. Another building Mr. Bridges failed to mention would be (inaudible) is that stone building out at the Elza Gate. That is a wonderful house out there.
MRS. ZUCKER: Does anybody know when, do you know the building we are talking about, just as you leave Oak Ridge and going east. There is a small stone house and I wonder if, if any one knows who built that? Yes, Pat.
MRS. CLARK: 1942, and the first family was the Owens family, I believe.
MRS. ZUCKER: When I was growing up, it was the Brennens who lived there and it was the only real house.
MR. TUNNELL: It was Oran Hackworth’s house.
MRS. BRUMMITT: It was Oran, O-R-A-N, and Olivia.
MR. TUNNELL: Hackworth.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Kidwell Hackworth.
MR. BRIDGES: I remember that house was there, too. It’s still there?
MRS. ZUCKER: It’s still there. I think so.
MR. BRIDGES: It’s still there, good.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, so those are the names of some of the families we would find here in the 1920’s and most of you have talked about where your families came from before then, but two of you didn’t come from this region over a multi-generational period. Reverend Wright, you can through the migration, you lived, you were dispossessed by TVA. Is that correct?
REV. WRIGHT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Tell us about that. Let’s go back to TVA and what happened.
REV. WRIGHT: My folks came originally from Cedar Creek, above Lafollette. That’s where my father was raised until, of course, about ’34 when Norris Dam was well under way while they ran everybody out. We came to Anderson County, like I said, two miles below Scarboro. You want me to talk about the bus, the transportation?
MRS. ZUCKER: Let’s get some transportation after a little bit. What I like to do is kind of lay out a historical pattern here. So you got notice to move from TVA land and then you moved to Oak Ridge. So, you went through a double dispossession.
REV. WRIGHT: I moved from Oakdale, a little Oakdale community about two miles below Loyston in Union County and moved to Anderson County and located in Bethel Valley. We owned the cross roads there where the big rock crusher went in. That was on our property. My father owned it. He worked with them, he stayed on. I get to the end of that moving from Oak Ridge. I went into the service in ’42, and missed all that. My mother and father moved and I didn’t know where my home was for, I guess, a year and a half until I was discharged out of the service. I will never forget walking, back then they about walked everywhere you went.
I got off the bus in a little city of Clinton and walked. I knew approximately where it was. I remember I got pretty anxious going up the hill there and came over the tip of the last hill and I could view the old home place below. A barn, an old house, a T-shape, two big rooms, a dining room and kitchen attached to it. Which when I came out of the service we, I cut lumber off of our property there and built a house. My father and I and one of my brothers remodeled his house. Took it all off but the two big rooms and did away with the kitchen and dining room and built him another bedroom and kitchen and a bathroom.
We didn’t have electricity at that time until we milked cows. So there would be milk and after I came out of the service we built an eight stall milk barn and they let us sell Grade-A milk to Norris Creamery. So I worked at that for 14 years. So I decided there was a better way to make a living and then I went to Clinton Courier News and worked for Mr. Wells for three and a half years, moved from there over to Knoxville. Brother Hubert Hodge worked for him, I guess, nine months and then moved up to Greenway there and Beverly Road and worked for Southern (inaudible) Forms until they sold out to (inaudible) Incorporated in Chicago, Illinois, and I didn’t realize at that time that they were a part of Bell and Howell. It wasn’t long until the big company, Bell and Howell, took us over. They kept us until the group wanted the union. Bell and Howell didn’t go for union. They voted the union in and Bill and Howe sold us to (inaudible) printing company, (inaudible), Texas. I worked for them the remainder of 27 years, about 15 years retired. All the time, I pastored these churches. I pastored Heinz Creek Baptist Church for ten and a half years, a little over. Then I was called to Bishopville there in Heiskell Station. Pastored their church 16 and a half a year. I was there without a church for five weeks, and they called me back the second time to Heinz Creek. I went back and pastored there for another nine years.
MRS. ZUCKER: You have had a really busy and productive life, haven’t you? Really good. I would like to find out if any of you remember the effect of the coming of electricity. Do you remember the lights went on in Anderson County? How about you?
MR. WRIGHT: There in Bethel Valley there was no electricity.
MRS. ZUCKER: There was no electricity after TVA?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Before.
MRS. ZUCKER: Before, ok.
MR. WRIGHT: All along through there they hadn’t brought any electrical power in.
MRS. ZUCKER: But after TVA, the lights must have gone on?
MR. WRIGHT: Not where we were at.
MRS. ZUCKER: Not where you were?
MRS. WINTENBERG: From Clinton, they came down through Robertsville with power poles.
MR. WRIGHT: But not Bethel Valley.
MRS. WINTENBERG: And then, I guess, that was the first ones who got the electricity.
MRS. ZUCKER: Did it make a big change in the area?
MRS. HOLMBERG: I suppose I was the only person when TVA had come that had an adverse effect on our lives, because my father had a business selling coal and ice before electricity and so eventually no one needed to have refrigerators. So his business started going down the tubes at that time.
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, that’s too bad. Well, I know he drove a school bus. Everybody here has mentioned your father as a school bus driver. I want to get to that. He was famous.
MRS. HOLMBERG: As business disappeared, he did before he came to work for Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: What were some of the occupations? Was this, would you describe this region as primarily a farming area?
MRS. HOLMBERG: My next-door neighbors who were my cousins. Frank Hightower had an interesting way of getting to work. He laid track and repaired track for the L&N Railroad. He would drive to Elza Gate and believe it or not the train would pick him up and take him to his area of work. In the summer time, or anytime the work site was so far away he lived on the cars, they called it, on a side track that was furnished for housekeeping. So that was fun riding the train every day to work in a rural community. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: That’s really wonderful. There were lots of transportation problems, I can imagine, in a rural district like this. What do you remember about the difficulty with farming in your own backgrounds as farmers? Yeah, talk about all that.
MRS. WINTENBERG: My parents were Irish, English, and French, and they came early. In Anderson County, the first listed was 1650. I don’t want to start a war. (Laughter) But anyhow the community was mostly farmers. People did drive to mills in Clinton by the time I had grown some. Mostly people lived on farms. Of course there was a little mail carrier who had a job, but the work was the key to the community. Everybody worked and you were taught that work was honorable, and that it was something that all of us must do. So, you learn to work. The people who had come down through my ancestors came first to Connecticut and Virginia, and from those two states migrated on to Anderson County. Some of them had as you say land grants, some of them just came, but they were all self-sufficient people. People were courageous, had to be to come into a wilderness. They were very wise. They believed in sharing, not only with their family. They wanted to make a better life for their families, but with the community.
MRS. ZUCKER: So there was a regional community that was strong?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: And it was centered on what? On Robertsville, what was the center, the focus of the community?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Well, it has been mentioned in the past it was probably family. I had two sets of great-grandparents and two sets of grandparents, who lived in the area and they had beauques of cousins and brothers and all in the vicinity of about five miles of each other. Is that what you’re after?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah, but I was just wondering what was the focal point was. Was it Clinton as the county seat? What was the center of commerce?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Robertsville was a community in itself. I think the churches, there were several churches there. In the ‘20s, there was probably a Methodist and Presbyterian church, but by the time we were growing up there was until the people from Norris, they came down to Robertsville and bought farms because there were a lot. Late in ’28, ‘30, along there, there was a Depression in the area, so there were a lot of farms for sale and lots of people like John Rice Irwin’s grandparents came and his own uncle and his own parents, and there were lots of people who moved into Oak Ridge from that, but before that, there were a lot of farm families in the churches and schools, that were the center. There were a lot of people who attended everything at the schools. They were all school minded. My parents said, “Go to school, make good grades, go to school”. My dad always said there is not going to be enough land for all seven of you to have a plot of land. So, choose some vocation, go to college, and choose something that you want to do that you can do and that you want to do.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, did he say that to girls as well as the boys?
MRS. WINTENBERG: Right, of course. Sitting around the dining room table, yes, I heard all the lectures to age one to at least 16 or 17. Behave yourself. Go to school.
MRS. ZUCKER: I want to hear a little more about farm life because it was a farming community.
MR. BRIDGES: We raised cane when we lived up there. There was a fellow named John Pyatt and he had a cane mill over there and we would take our mules, hook it to a wagon, and we would go over there and stay all day, and make molasses over there. A lot of people raised that cane, and then we would bring it back and put it in big cans, lard cans or something like that. When you didn’t have money or something to buy sugar, we would just sweeten it with molasses. There were a lot of things we done like that. We made our own soap. I remember my mother making soap and stuff out of the hogs, when you killed the hogs. You made soap and things with them. I didn’t know Ernest here. That’s where I was born, up there at Cedar Creek, around where his people were at. I didn’t know him up there. When he named Cedar Creek, that’s when I was at Cider Mill. Anyway, seemed like the happiest time of my life was when I went to that CCC camp up at Norris.
MRS. ZUCKER: Can you explain to the audience, I think most people here will know what the CCC was, but if you would explain it.
MR. BRIDGES: It’s a big Conservation Corp. And like poor families and we were counted as a poor family because there was big family of us. So I had an older brother and he went in and then I went in. All you had to say back then, you had to tell a little bitty white lie, if they are a white lie. (Laughter) You walked in and you say, they say, “How old are you?” “Eighteen”. You done been put up to other boys before that. So I was 16 when I went in there. I went to Norris SP-9-44-93 up here at Norris and I stayed up there two months.
All at once I found out that they were shipping a bunch of boys out and we could volunteer and go, or not go. We was going to get to go to the West Coast, to (inaudible). I was really glad to go. My brother, he come up there and he was only 14 years old. He told them he was 18, and he told them he was my twin brother and he was much smaller than I was. (Laughter) They know better, but still they were needing men, I reckon, and they just took him in too. So we went to (inaudible) 14. So we stayed out there about six months. We saw some of the country. We didn’t have a TV to see all these and didn’t know they existed really. We saw some of the prettiest country to go on out to the West Coast and riding that troop train. We ate on it, slept on it, everything. We had just a big time out there in that CCC camp. It was what the CC done.
They done all kinds of tree work, planted trees, and filled up gullies and built roads, and work in a rock quarry. I remember working in a rock quarry. We didn’t have nothing but a wheelbarrow (inaudible) and we would put off little shots and we would take the wheelbarrow and take a big sledge hammer and bust those rocks and take them down there and dump them in the crusher and then they would go in a little dump truck and they would take them out where they needed them and different places like that. Even the government had a poor way of doing it. I remember a dollar a day was all we could make, that was all my daddy could make back in the ‘30’s. When we moved here in ’34, he would try to get a little more work for someone else. I remember when I got to work for Stone-Webster; we made 51 cents an hour. Boy that was flying high! I had money to just do about anything with, more than that now. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: I think I’m cheating because I’m always very entertained by Mr. Bridges stories. I do know, and I believe I am right, that you sent eight dollars of what you made back home.
MR. BRIDGES: We made 30 dollars a month in the camp and they gave us eight. So we had plenty money in the CC camp. Because you see they laundered our clothes and gave us food to eat. We didn’t smoke. I never have smoked, never did drink. So, we didn’t have much to spend our money on.
MRS. ZUCKER: You sent a lot of it home.
MR. BRIDGES: When I came back out of the CC camp we had those silver dollars, I don’t know how many I had in a big locker. We just had a good time. That cc started me out, made me happier than everything at CCC camp.
MRS. ZUCKER: Were any of you in World War II? I know that Reverend Wright was. Was anyone else? Mr. Tunnell?
MR. TUNNELL: I was drafted out of high school. In April, I was drafted out of high school, Robertsville High School. I had been sick and had missed some work in high school and then I went back and I was drafted in April and I took the final examination down at the Fort Oglethorpe. When I had passed through the general headquarters, after taking the IQ test, and for some reason they accepted me, pulled me up into the general headquarters to work. I came back. After they found out down there that I hadn’t graduated from high school, I was scheduled to graduate in May here. Naomi has a copy of the picture there of me in a uniform that I came back and graduated from high school, while I was a private in the Army and I was taking some, then I started college and they moved me down there. I became a good secretary and they sent me to Iran and Iraq. I spent three years over there during World War II.
MRS. ZUCKER: Was that a pivotal experience in your life? Did it change your view of your future to be in service?
MR. TUNNELL: All my life I knew I was going to be a lawyer because I remember Cordel Hull, who had floated down the Tennessee River on a bunch of logs, down to Lebanon and I was going to go to law school down there. On the GI Bill, I didn’t go to law school there. At the University of Tennessee, fortunate enough I got an undergraduate degree, and then graduated from law school, got two degrees over there and then for a short time went to Harvard Law School.
Some of the transportation that he was talking about don’t think he mentioned it. Mr. Bridges, you don’t know this that mules were used to traveled all the time. We would come over to Nash Copeland’s Store from the Marlow Community across our land on what is Key Springs Road now and come over to down where Underwood Road is, just right below where I live. It was Hendricks Hollow then. It had a road there and we would drive a team of mules and come over. It was a wonderful experience to come over there because I got to see Naomi at Nash Copeland’s Store. (Laughter)
MRS. BRUMMITT: My turn.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it’s your turn.
MR. BRIDGES: Now, talking about mules…
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, what a minute. It’s her turn now. She’s had her hand up over there.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Now, I’ve got a sad story. Ok, bear with me. I was born in Roane County in 1924. Before this in 1923, meningitis came to the area and I lost two little sisters. One was three and a half and the other was eight months, and this is my three and a half’s ring. Alright so in 1924, I was born. I must have been a bundle of joy after that. But in 1925, my father died with tuberculosis.
Now I have a survivor story. My hero is my mother, Addie Reed Magill. She had so much faith in God, a devout Christian, a wonderful neighbor. Henrietta can vouch for that. And like Henrietta said, she instilled the values of life into all of us - hard work, treat your neighbor right, be a friend to everybody, you’ll make it, study and work. That was it. All of these deaths happened, by the way, in the month of March. So I think my mom would have like to have torn out the month of March from all the calendars. But then we moved to Robertsville when I was 10 years old. My mom aired, also washed and dried, and folded clothes for John Rice Irwin’s grandparents- the Rev. John and his lovely wife who was such a joy. Also for the Locketts and they had a son who is a doctor (inaudible) just passed away not long ago. My mother could have been a pioneer on a covered wagon going west. She was very strong she was an excellent cook she was a seamstress, she was a third grade student, but she was self-taught. She could write, there was always an open Bible in the house. Bible reading was an everyday thing.
When we came to Robertsville, we lived on Henrietta’s dad’s farm for a while with my oldest sister and my brother-in-law, who were tenants on the farm. In fact, my brother-in-law, Ralph Mead, went to Wheat High School and played six man football there. My oldest sister, his wife, graduated from Wheat High School. She had an injury when she was young and was cripple, but she on crutches finished high school, graduated from Wheat High school in 1930. She was not handicapped because she could do just about anything she wanted to do.
Back to Robertsville, main street Robertsville, and my heroes there were my teachers. I had some wonderful people cross my path and I am so grateful. Two of those were Henrietta’s sisters- Lucille Peck Hill was such a wonderful teacher and she should have been a missionary. I think at one time had inclinations to be a missionary, but she was a teacher in more than just school subjects. She had our first Vacation Bible School that I attended when I was 11 years old. Henrietta’s sister, Mildred, was my English Literature teacher. Mildred loved music. I always loved music. She organized a choral club at in our high school, at Robertsville. She also had me singing in a trio. And some of the other people that were real important along main street Robertsville I remember Vera Hightower was one that helped me in music. Her dad was a minister. He had been in an accident, something to do with mining and had both hands blown off. I remember that family well. The Roberts, Louise Roberts, on main street Robertsville, was one of my teachers. That was from an old family right Henrietta. George Anderson from just (inaudible) between Robertsville and Scarboro, was an instrumental. His family was in my life. He had a teacher, a sister, Ora. There are teachers all around. There were more teachers in this area. I am sure the percentage is very high for educators.
MRS. ZUCKER: Was taking an educational role a way to move up the socioeconomic ladder for a lot of people in the area? Was that the direction?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Possibly, yes.
MR. WRIGHT: My mother was a teacher at Wheat.
MRS. ZUCKER: Any teachers in any of your families? This is the teacher table over here. And your mother and your sisters and you were a teacher. So something about this region inspired it.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Your brother was a teacher.
REV. WRIGHT: My mother and three brothers were school teachers. Had a set of twin brothers, Max and Rex, both graduated from Carson Newman after they got out of the service. My mother had taught earlier before the children had started growing up. She went back and renewed her teacher’s certificate with the twin brothers at Carson Newman. She taught then until she retired. And of course the twins have retired. Albert, my brother next to me older, he also was a teacher.
MRS. ZUCKER: While you are speaking, tell a little bit about, because I know you have quite an interesting story about going to school yourself about transportation to school and that way you can talk a little bit about transportation. I know we have a story here that is fun.
REV. WRIGHT: We didn’t have the nice buses they have today of course. They just bought the running gears off a truck. A ton and a half just had the motor and the hood. They build the rest of it. Had curtains about that high. You could stand up. I suppose it was about five feet maybe, and they had curtains all around the sides that could be rolled up or down. There was a bench, just a plank around each side and maybe partly across the back. They had an emergency door.
George Rheafield drove our bus. I guess he drove about 15 miles in all. He’d start about three miles above the Bethel Church and Bethel Valley turned off there and went into a little community called Park City. And where they got its name, there were people who had relocated from Smoky Mountain National Park. There was a family of Prophets, and two families of Prices, and two or three families of Rheafields, and a family of Huskys. And they came on up Bethel Valley and turned down to my place there. We went down to Freel’s Bend on the River Road and I had to back track down from Gallaher Ferry. They went down to Gallaher Ferry almost and then back and then came on around Freel’s Bends. Huddlesons, Shepards, Freels.
MRS. ZUCKER: I hope you all eventually write down all the names of all the families that you can remember and get them onto paper. It seems to me that there is such a valuable record of history right here at this table. Reba, your…
MR. WRIGHT: I did that before I came here.
MRS. ZUCKER: I noticed you did that write those down and I bet you could be coerced into giving people copies.
MR. WRIGHT: Shoot girl. Sure thing. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: It is a very nice write up about Raoul’s history here. Before we leave school buses, I want to point out that Reba’s father drove a school bus and a lot of you rode on that school bus, some of you did maybe. And he had to buy his own bus, didn’t he?
MRS. HOLMBERG: Yes, he had a contract with the county, and in fact, I guess he owned two or three buses and had drivers. He had to buy his own buses. I don’t know if he did well or not, but he was quite the taskmaster of the bus. In those days, if a kid misbehaved, he would make them get off the bus out in the county. I can’t imagine the consequences of doing that today. I’ve heard many people say, “Well, Andy put me off the bus out in the middle of nowhere.”
MRS. ZUCKER: (Laughter) So there may be people wondering around there still.
MRS. HOLMBERG: That’s right. (Laughter)
MR. TUNNELL: He was a wonderful fella, perhaps one of the most popular people that lived in our community. He let us call him Andy. We would attend basketball games and he took us out to Knoxville on time.
AUDIENCE: Microphone.
MR. TUNNELL: I said her father, we all called him Andy, the driver, was one of the most popular and most wonderful people I ever met. I loved him to death. He always let me sit right up beside him and talked to him all the time. That’s probably why he didn’t put me off. We talked about the principal at Robertsville High School. We’d talk about going on a trip and he would tell me how much it was going to be. Andy would always talk to me about this. He’d say that the principle said, “I don’t think we can come out on that, on that amount of money”. And so Andy he’d say, “Well, we got a trip we can come out on, so we’ll go into Knoxville.” (Laughter) We had a wonderful time with him. He was a great gentleman.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I want to say one other thing about my dad which concerns teachers. He was on the school board for this area and in those days teachers didn’t have tenure. So in the summertime, we would have a parade of teachers come by the house to make sure their job was secure in the fall
MRS. ZUCKER: Did they bring any offerings like cakes?
MRS. HOLMBERG: Maybe under the table. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: Very good. I want to just go back to Mr. Tunnell just a minute. We are going to run out of time, unbelievable, it goes so fast. I would like you to paint if you can and I think you are the right person to do it, but please join in, a kind of political picture of Anderson County before the buyout. What was the county like politically? What was the structure like?
MR. TUNNELL: Before the what?
MRS. ZUCKER: Before Oak Ridge.
MR. TUNNELL: Well, actually I don’t think there was really anything much around except the Republicans and the Baptists at that time. (Laughter)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Amen!
MRS. ZUCKER: Were they part of the same…
MR. TUNNELL: I heard someone say “Amen” here. (Laughter) I remember one time when I was just a little boy and we were having an election. One of the candidates for sheriff, I was up at the jail. That was my first experience with politics. This of course was a dry county there was not any booze around, but you would walk through the jail there and I noticed they were handing up through the floor there. If you got a bottle of that liquor you were suppose to vote for a particular person. (Laughter) It was interesting.
We had a handsome young fella from over in the mountain area, named McClee Daugherty. He looked like Marshall Dillon and he ran for Sheriff of the county and was elected. He went back to that little community. I think it was Charlie’s Branch, and back in that area. He knew where all these stills were, because everybody had a still. I remember when Mother and I would go to the mill, we would walk along just what’s part of Oak Ridge right now. One of their dogs would bring the cows in and we would see people, you know where their stills are down there. Mother would speak to them and call them Samsbush and so forth. Just like, well you know, they were business men that had a real good business. (Laughter) A lot of people came in from Knoxville and bought the moonshine. McClee went back to raid and he hadn’t been the sheriff long, but when they came back they brought him back in a casket because they killed him over there. It was kind of a dangerous occupation to have.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well even when I…
MR. TUNNELL: We had a very colorful shirt that Uncle Bob Smith. He was Buzz Elkins, I guess about everyone has heard of Buzz the highway-ist. He was his grandfather, I believe. He always walked around without a gun. I remember I was just down there on the ridge on what is part of my farm. The farm from the old Tunnell place. He raided there that day. He stood there and said to the fella, he said “Sammy-boy I believe everything is clean here now. You’re out of business.” He said, “Yes, you’re right. I just quit.” And so just as he walked off, he took his foot and pushed the leaves back and he had a barrel there with that mash in there that they use to make liquor with. He said, “He’s not a very good observer I can see, but he’s a good sheriff.” (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: When I first came to Anderson County which was 1944, there was still a lot of, let’s say territorial warfare going on back up the hills. There was periodically a shooting. It usually turned out to be over land and property. But probably stills had something to do with it, I would say.
MR. TUNNELL: Definitely did.
MRS. ZUCKER: It was a business problem you might say. What were your memories of political life of the region, Raoul? Do you have any memories?
MR. WRIGHT: We lived on the farm over there…
AUDIENCE: Mic!
MRS. ZUCKER: Sorry, thank you.
MR. WRIGHT: We lived on a farm over by the river and there weren’t any politics over there at all. No one even hardly knew we were there. We had a large farm over there. We were a real close-knit family. At 960 acres, it took a lot of people to work the farm. Aunts and uncles and kids and everything. Everybody worked. Everybody had a job to do. The only time we about leave there would be to go to Clinton or Knoxville, about once a month for a few supplies and always to church on Sunday. We went to a church over by X-10. The church there that was a Baptist church that we went to. The most memorable thing was when the Army came to take the farm.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I was just about to get there. I have one question before we get to talking about that. I think it is time that we do so. I know that you described health problems in your family, in your lost members. How did people take care of themselves medically? Where were the medical centers and how did that work?
MRS. HOLMBERG: I can answer that. In the beginning, we had one of the only telephones in the area. So many people came to our house for emergency phone calls. Possibly a baby was coming because all babies were born at home at that time, including my sister and I. Possibly for the undertaker because the nearest hospital was in Knoxville and not many people took advantage of that, of the hospital. The closest doctors were in Oliver Springs. They were Dr. Wallard, Dr. Hayes, and Dr. Hecker, and they all made house calls. I remember once my great-grandmother putting an onion poultice on an infection that my grandfather had. So they used home remedies. That’s what I know about the medical profession.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now, I think your family, Daws, had a lot to do with herbal remedies, as I remember.
MR. BRIDGES: With what?
MRS. ZUCKER: Herbal remedies. You once told me that you went out and picked things.
MR. BRIDGES: Yeah. Yeah.
MRS. ZUCKER: What were some of medicines that you used?
MR. BRIDGES: My daddy was a hunter and we always, he was a bee hunter, too. He, Rice Irwin, he sat right in front of me in Robertsville School, him and David did, you know. Rice, when I go up there now he says, “I want to tell you your daddy was the best bee hunter.” He had a hive, watch those bees go up to the branches somewhere where the creek was at and he could watch them and he said they went round and round and round like that. I watched them too. Then they set a beeline straight to a tree way up in the mountain. He’d take a few minutes and find it. He’d make a big cross mark on there if it hadn’t been marked or somebody found it and they made a cross mark with their knives, you know. He would go back and cut them, you know. We use to have big lard cans full of honey and give honey away.
MRS. ZUCKER: But you didn’t use that for medicine.
MR. BRIDGES: What?
MRS. ZUCKER: You didn’t use that for medicine, did you?
MR. BRIDGES: No.
MRS. ZUCKER: But you did, tell me some other things that you used.
MR. BRIDGES: You could use it for medicine too.
MR. WRIGHT: You could mix it with sulfur.
MRS. ZUCKER: Mix it with sulfur.
MR. BRIDGES: You could mix it with vinegar and a little salt. I still use it for a sore throat. And put a spoonful of honey or two down in there, and then gargle it. You can drink a little of it and its real good. Honey is good for you.
MRS. ZUCKER: I have a cold right now.
MR. BRIDGES: We used a lot of herbs like golden seal and ginseng. I still take golden seal about every morning. I buy it up here at Jackson Square, it’s in a powder.
MRS. ZUCKER: But you don’t go out to the woods and hunt it any more. You go down to the store and buy it?
MR. BRIDGES: I got a hundred or two buckets sitting there in my woods now. I have fooled with a lot of wildflowers and raised a big garden. I raised too much. I got about two bushel of beans about to turn the truck over. I can give some of them and get rid of some of them today.
MRS. ZUCKER: Make a note to meet him in the parking lot.
MR. BRIDGES: I’ve got two bushel there in the truck. I like to work. My wife has asked me why I don’t stop working. A lot of times a dark will bring me home from working and what I’m doing. I’ve got hundreds of plants down there from where I had that nursery, you know. I grow ginseng down there. I got golden seal down there. There are so many different types of herbs, you know. You can make tea out of pennyroyal.
MRS. ZUCKER: Did you all use herbs, herbal medicines?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Castor oil is good.
MRS. ZUCKER: Do what?
MRS. BRUMMITT: Castor oil.
MRS. ZUCKER: Castor oil.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Epsom salts, Black drought.
MR. WRIGHT: Cod liver oil.
MRS. BRUMMITT: The first aspirin I had was in high school. When I was a freshman in high school was my first aspirin. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: Ok, let’s move on to the pre-Oak Ridge story. Do you all remember the first moment you knew you were going to be moved from your land? Raoul, tell me the first knowledge you had of that.
MR. WRIGHT: The Army came to the farm, had a, maybe a piece of paper like this, and told them they wanted to buy the farm. Well my grandpa said the farm wasn’t for sale.
MRS. ZUCKER: Pull the mic a little closer.
MR. WRIGHT: Ok, said the farm wasn’t for sale. They said, “Ok, well, we’re here buying all the farms.” We were the last family to leave Oak Ridge. And we didn’t go out the gate; they shipped us across the river. They came two weeks before they condemned it, they came and got all the firearms, they took every one of them. Not the hand guns, but all the long ones. They took all those. My grandfather kept going to the county court and the Clinton Engineering Works wondering why they had to have his farm because it was next to river. It wasn’t close to anything. So anyway--
MRS. ZUCKER: And of course there was no explanation for why they were taking it.
MR. WRIGHT: No. Absolutely not. So when they came to evict us, they brought a barge and the river was high. The river fluctuated quite a bit. The river was high and they brought a barge and loaded everything there was in the whole farm. Moved it across the river to the bank of Hickory Creek and set it out. And the rest of us, we were the last ones on the barge across the river. So we built tents and camped out over there. Every time they thought the Army left he would start heading back across the river. (Laughter) They always kept the MP’s over there because they knew he was going to keep coming back. (Laughter) That went on for several months. They finally came in and destroyed the whole farm. We had a new house, big house. They went and bulldozed it down and all the barns, everything they completely destroyed it, the whole farm. Except for the old silo and this old silo is still there. It is all covered with Kudzu now.
MRS. ZUCKER: Now where is it exactly?
MR. WRIGHT: It’s behind X-10 on the river. It’s right across where you go down the valley over there, what they call Hickory Creek. Hardin Valley comes out right at the river. It’s right up on the hill.
MRS. ZUCKER: Such beautiful land. Beautiful land.
MR. WRIGHT: It is pretty land. I was there about 10 years ago and I went down the river and the silo was still there. It’s the only thing they didn’t destroy.
MRS. ZUCKER: Henrietta, tell me about your first memory of the …
MRS. WINTENBERG: Well, there were flags all in the fields and along the roads and in the fields. My mother saw them, saw some men putting the flags and she asked them, “What are you doing?” She had been across the road to the orchard. We not only had lots of farm crops and everything, but also had across the road from our house, an orchard.
If you are going from the beginning to the Turnpike down toward K-25, or down toward Oliver Springs, you would see between the Lutheran Church and the Methodist Church, one pear tree, it is getting a little raggy now. It has some rotten limbs, I have noticed. But for years there were pears, it bloomed white, and there were pears on that tree. When you see that pear tree you know you’re standing on the Peck ground. And the Principal or the people I would tell would laugh about it. I thought it was fun; I just wanted them to know where I grew up.
So, finally at the church, I guess, people told that the government is going to take the land. The Army is coming in here to take the land. Why in the world would they want Robertsville for? We didn’t dream that they were going to take 56,000 acres. Possible more than that they took. Anyways, she became the more and more worried. I started back to UT. Of course the schools had begun to close. So, I would come home and my mother would just be, “What am I going to do?”, because my brother had gone to the service, the older brothers and sisters were all away and graduated from college and gone. My brother was going into the Air Corps. Our tenant was already working for Mr. Copeland then, the Copeland Store.
My mother finally decided that if she had to leave, she had to leave. I think they slipped a little note under the door possibly in the middle of October, or the first of November. But anyhow, she had a short time to get out. Cows, it was a farm, a working farm. But, we always had three or four horses; three or four milk cows; lots of calves.
In fact, when my father died in ’37, my mother had no idea how many young yearlings or calves that he had. She didn’t know because her job was with seven children, and to the chores around the home, and the canning, and see after the home. So here was my mom with all these things with old, rakes with sizes of all kinds, all kinds of tools, a barn full of everything, so she just finally started doing the best she could.
She first found a house, she thought, that had a barn and had some things, and she was going to take it. But then this man came back, even though she had signed and given him 500 or so, and he said, “Here is your check.” He said, “I can’t take it because I have a lady how has a…,” I forgotten if it was crippled or mentally handicapped son, “…and I’m going to let her have it.” Well, my mother was devastated, but, you know, once people said no, they say no, and she came back home.
Finally, we moved to a house in South Clinton. It did have an acre or two of land. So she could take a few chickens; she could take things. It had a huge basement. One of my sisters, she use to say, “You should see that basement. It’s stacked and stacked and tripled stacked,” she’d say. But anyhow we finally got moved there. And then from there we bought a newer home in Clinton because we were all tired of my mother having to carry coal or wood. And so this house had electric heat. It was a wonderful thing for her and for me because I was, as I said, the one left. My brother needed to finish school and to go to college.
And by the way, my dad use to always say, “Don’t be a farmer. It is very hard work, you don’t get anything. You will work from dawn until after dark.” You know, my brother graduated from the university, got a master’s degree and worked for TVA in the fertilizer division. And all of the sudden we hear he and his wife were buying a farm down in the Sweetwater Valley. We all shook our heads and said, “Surely not!” (Laughter) But he is still living there and he has loved it.
MRS. ZUCKER: So, the farm blood still ran…
MRS. WINTENBERG: Through him, but not me.
MRS. ZUCKER: Reba, do you remember the moment of eviction?
MRS. HOLMBERG: No, I was in school and I wasn’t on top of all the trauma. But my folks moved nearby and we still have that farm over by Tri-County Center. The medical center built a hospital on the spot where our farm house was.
But while I have the floor I would like to read something about what writers said of this valley. This is from June’s class. Daniel Lang’s book called Early Tales of the Atomic Age. He said, “Scarboro, Wheat, and Robertsville are names of vanished places where the hill folk of this region went in for what amounted to non-profit farming, some tobacco plants, a couple of hogs, some poultry, perhaps a head or two of cattle, and a little moonshine making.” He went on to say, “The Army Engineers and Contractors arrived on the scene in 1942, and went to work on the scrappy, unattractive, particularly routerless terrain, and quails roamed the place, and the guards picked off skunks with their rifles.” Not a very nice picture of the area.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I think it is beautiful land.
MRS. WINTENBERG: Let me tell you about our farm. Our farm, my father always grew. It was 180 acres. Let’s see, it came from the Olivers. My grandmother, or great-grandmother, Amelia, I’m getting lost here. We’ve been looking up so much of my genealogy and it has gone so far back and back. There was a lot of land from the Olivers, but apparently, as different ones took it, a grandfather and then maybe even on down. My father didn’t sell any. But it had been like a 1,260 acre tract of land. But when my dad got it, it was around 180, up and down the Turnpike. My father enjoyed farming. In fact, an uncle told me in long years after my father was gone, but what my dad had that no one else seemed to have in the family, was contentment. I said, “What do you mean ‘contentment’?” He said, “He loved farming; he loved you kids; he loved his wife.” Of course he had had two or three wives, so maybe he didn’t know what he was talking about. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: It wasn’t for long.
MRS. WINTENBERG: But anyhow, there were all his corn cribs, one or two corn cribs filled with corn. We had bad years. We had flooded years where things were sort of wiped out. We always had lots and lots of corn, oats, wheat. It was a real farming farm. My father took loads of wheat in big white sacks. I can see them. A truck would come in and load them and he would take them to Jail and Smith in Knoxville and trade them for flour. It was sort of a barter. You did this, for this. We always had chickens, a hen house, and a young chicken house. The children helped with all the milking, three or four cows to milk. As soon as we got home from school, we would put our sweater and skirt or whatever, and went out to shell the corn and do things, milk the cows, and so on. My dad had cash crops. He had things that he sold for cash. He grew tobacco. “Don’t ever get into tobacco, its poisonous. Why do you think I keep three or four leaves down in this barrel? It’s poisonous. You don’t get into tobacco.” We said, “But you…”
MRS. ZUCKER: “You’re growing it.”
MRS. WINTENBERG: “You’re growing it and you use it.” “Well,” he said, “Brother 15 taught a little 11 year old brother. I don’t believe I was 11, maybe 10, to chew.” He said, “Don’t get into tobacco, at all. It is a bad thing.”
MRS. ZUCKER: I can’t imagine moving all that stuff. That’s really amazing.
MRS. WINTENBERG: This was back in the ‘20’s. Well anyhow, we grew all these things. My father always had tomatoes to sell. Sometimes we had a little place near our garage, where they could come of Highway 61. We would put watermelons there, bushels of peaches. I well remember one sister one time told a man, she told him, “These watermelons are a quarter and these are fifty cents.” So, he gave her two quarters and picked up the biggest two melons. “No,” she said, she just went and stood right in front of him and said, “No, you have the wrong melons.” She said, “Put them down.” He kept going to his car. She ran over to him again and she said, “Put. Them. Down.” Finally, he came back and put them down and reached in his pocket and gave her another. Well, he said, “Give me back my quarters,” and he gave her a dollar. So, then he took two of the large melons.
MRS. ZUCKER: I’d like to get back since we are so short on time, if you don’t mind. I would like to get back to the experience of being kicked off your land. I think that is a huge emotional experience for everyone, I think. Yes, please, talk about that.
MRS. BRUMMITT: (inaudible)
MRS. ZUCKER: Microphone, please. Thank you.
MRS. BRUMMIT: Thank you. At the time that they came in to take the property in Oak Ridge, my mom and I were living with J. Nash Copeland and Wynneta. I’m sure a lot of you know that. My mom and I lived with them for four years while I was in high school. okay, their property was taken, was condemned. My mom had been the caretaker for the boys and had helped them in the store and everything. So, they would no longer have a store and would no longer have a need for domestic help. So, they moved. My mom and I had to move in with my oldest sister and her husband. My mom still owned 40 acres of land in Roane County. I don’t know how she was notified that they were taking the land. I do know that they offered 450 dollars for 40 acres of land. So she went to court. The attorney, Sam Carson was the attorney and they upped it to 900 dollars. However, there was no will. My father had no will. Here he had six heirs. We all got 125 dollars.
MRS. ZUCKER: Do you remember how much your daddy was paid, Daws?
MR. BRIDGES: We had about 60 acres and we got 1200 dollars for it and we just built a new house and a barn and he was satisfied and he said, “You boys, a lot of you have got to go the Army. There is going to an awful big war, and everything going on.” He said that is the purpose that they told us, what they were building here, you know. It was a secret, you know, they kept it secret and there was no telling what they were going to build. They got the atomic bomb, but (inaudible) it’s going to be. So he went ahead and took the 1200 dollars and we located, he located up behind the creek up there. But I know that he didn’t complain about it. He’d say if it wasn’t enough. The Children’s Museum, our property come up close to his, from Key Springs area, that road down there, and I remember we had eight acres of corn and I remember my daddy, I’m going to get up a minute and walk. We had a little old job (inaudible). My daddy plowed all day, (inaudible) the corn (inaudible) I know it had one grain in it (inaudible) he’d be like that all day planting that corn (inaudible) you drop a bean (inaudible) we done that after the corn plowed the first time so it wouldn’t break the corn down. We had beans and beans and beans.
MRS. ZUCKER: And they are still out in the parking lot.
MR. BRIDGES: What?
MRS. ZUCKER: And they are still out in the parking lot. Would you like to sit down now? They are still out in the parking lot. There are beans out in that parking lot. (Laughter)
MR. BRIDGES: (inaudible) every time you do that (inaudible) we were satisfied.
MRS. ZUCKER: What was your story? Do you remember when you got the notice that you had to move off of the land?
REV. WRIGHT: No, I don’t. I had gone overseas.
MRS. ZUCKER: You were overseas and just couldn’t find it when you got back.
REV. WRIGHT: I remember one thing though. You know we live through all kinds of (inaudible) when I was a child (inaudible) then we got a (inaudible) and then finally (inaudible) just drove through the field and combined it. We cut it; we thrashed it; and poured it out into a bag, so from a cradle to a combine, we lived this generation.
MRS. ZUCKER: I would like to ask one final question because I know our time is running out and that is do any of you remember exactly the moment when you learned what had been made in Oak Ridge and where you were when the bomb was dropped. I know Reba does. Bring the microphone over.
MRS. HOLMBERG: I worked in the chemistry lab and we worked with an element called tipoloy and we used it in the equation S T. And I learned from the molecular way that it was uranium. But I had no clue of the consequences. So a friend and I were in Florida on vacation and in the war time, all coastal cities were blacked out, but I guess we were stir crazy that night. So, we decided to sneak out in the middle of the night and go swimming in the ocean. The landlady heard us and she came and said if we had been apprehended by the coast guard, she would have been in trouble and would have lost her permit.
Well, the next morning, the announcement of the dropping of the bomb was all over the front pages. She became quite excited and called the newspaper office and said we have people right here under my roof from Oak Ridge. So, a photographer and a reporter came out and interviewed us and we were splashed on the front page the next day, saying, “Girls in Oak Ridge helped to build Atom Bomb”. (Laughter) So we went from being in the dog house to celebrities overnight. (Laughter)
MRS. ZUCKER: (Laughter) Mr. Tunnell, do you remember the moment?
MR. TUNNELL: Yes ma’am. I was in Casablanca. I was in the Army at that particular time. One thing I would like to point out here that, have we talked about integration or segregation at all?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I’m sorry we didn’t get to that because it’s important.
MR. TUNNELL: We had three or four black families in the community at that time. They would come over to our house, or we would go over to their house. By the way, I went through all these things that these people are talking about. Doing work on the farm and all. But these colored people, we’d call them and they would come over to our home. We didn’t know what integration or segregation meant then because they’d come and eat with us, or we’d eat with them, you know, and never thought anything about it. They had their own church up there. I would get up there and act like I was preaching in their church. It was up there where Orange Lane is now.
MRS. ZUCKER: Where I live.
MR. TUNNELL: That area right there that Sam Carter and Hank Dicey Griffin and that group. They fish down there a lot in the Poplar Creek where my farm runs through there. And now it runs through the farm. They were wonderful people. If we had the same race relationship then as we have, if we had it now like we did then, it would be a lot better world. They were just such wonderful, wonderful people.
MRS. ZUCKER: Thank you for bring that up.
MR. TUNNELL: I was in Casablanca. That’s where I was. I was over there on a special assignment for the Army.
MRS. ZUCKER: I have one more question and then I think we are out of time. But I wanted to give Mrs. Wintenberg a chance to describe the cemetery and what has happened to it. Because I think that is kind of sad. It’s a sad story, but it’s an interesting one to end on.
AUDIENCE: Microphone.
MRS. WINTENBERG: I worked at Willow Brook School and back of Willow Brook School was the cemetery for lots and lots of people who lived. Reba’s grandparents…
MRS. HOLMBERG: My great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, my sisters were all laid there.
MRS. WINTENBERG: Lots and lots of people were buried there. My mother’s parents and there are grandparents and there was also a huge stone for Collin Roberts. And many times one of the fifth or sixth grade teachers would come and she’d say we have been studying. We are trying to finalize somethings and we would like for you to come and tell us more about Oak Ridge. So they would get me. The young children that I was working with would go home at 2:40, and they would come and ask me to come to their room so that I could tell them what was here and why this cemetery was over there. This was a little Baptist church, and I guess it was the main Baptist church. My grandfather had given the land for the school. I don’t know whether that included the Baptist church or not.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, what has happened to cemetery now?
MRS. WINTENBERG: The cemetery, each year that we would go I would see a little more mowed, and a little more plowed under. The first thing was there was somebody wanted a road on the right side of the church. So they proceeded to make one. That took about the first row of graves, tomb stones and all. And then there would be this huge pile of tomb stones and when you walked back here would be the label Crozier, here would be all the people, Jetts, Fosters, Albrights.
Finally, I said to myself, “You have got to do something.” First, I called the AEC and they said, “They don’t have the cemeteries anymore.” So then I called the City and asked to speak to someone in charge of the cemeteries and the mowing. This man very generously answered and he said, “We don’t care. We don’t know anything about them. We don’t care anything about them. Nobody knows who those people were. They are long ago dead.” And I said, “Yes, I know that but I care about them and I want to know them.” He said, “Well Lady, it’s done, just live with it.” And I was still sort of perturbed about it.
So eventually I thought I’ll go to see him instead of just talking on the phone. I’ve never been very good at talking on the phone. So, I went down and as I went in I saw this man sneaking out, but of course I didn’t know that this was the man I had come to see. Well, when I went in, she said, “Oh, he’s just stepped out a moment. Have a seat.” So I sat and I sat and I sat. So I went up fifteen or twenty minutes, and I said, “Where is he?” “Well, he’s gone to talk with someone.” And I said, “But I had called,” I said, “Did he not know?” She said, “He possibly did,” and then she said, “He just doesn’t want to comment about it anymore, just doesn’t want to speak of it anymore.”
MRS. ZUCKER: When I was a kid, I use to go around the cemeteries around Oak Ridge and just read the stones. It was like a group of magical people that I really wanted to know about.
MR. WRIGHT: They were suppose to keep up the cemeteries from now on. That was the promise we had that it would always be taken care of. Some still do get mowed sometimes.
MRS. BRUMMITT: Especially around Decoration Day.
MRS. WINTENBERG: It was fine to mow, but they left a grassy spot. They didn’t mow in between.
MRS. ZUCKER: Our time is up. I am so sorry. I know that every one of you has a story that could fill another hour and a half at least. And I am sorry that I didn’t give all of you more time to talk. But thank you so much for what talking you have done. I really appreciate it.
(Applause)
[End of Video]